All kinds of fun on the Western Slope!

Colorado National Monument from downtown Grand Junction

...western slope of the Rocky Mountains, that is. A nice trip to Grand Junction last May—primarily for baseball, as you will see—provided opportunities for great touristy experiences of many varieties.

In addition to the great views (above and below) from an observation tower downtown...

the Book Cliffs and Mt. Garfield

...we took an interesting hike near Fruita (named for the great produce from this area), the Paleo Loop:

It included this picturesque cabin, once actually inhabited until the not-so-distant past:

Fruita's just down the road from Junction, but we also took a longer trip, to Meeker, further north along the Western Slope. A museum there was displaying a very interesting exhibit from the Smithsonian about the influence of native American stories and myths on mainstream culture. The museum itself was full of fascinating objects and would be worth a side trip. This is just one of the items that caught my fancy—an unbelievably ornate fireplace surround:

There was more history on display closer to home. This beautifully maintained torpedo bomber lives at the Grand Junction airport, watched over by the Rocky Mountain Wing of the Commemorative Air Force.

I got a special tour of the plane and the adjacent museum, since one of my hosts is a member of this august organization. Here's another shot of the highly polished engine of this TBM-3 Avenger, a model first used in WWII at the Battle of Midway:

This particular craft wasn't in that battle, but it did fly over the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II!

So many fun activities during this visit, including a very interesting and entertaining talk by David French, the NY Times columnist, sponsored by Restore the Balance, a group working to blunt political extremism in our national discourse. Yes, there are progressives in the intermountain west!

But the main reason for the visit was, of course, baseball. It had been several years since I was last at the Junior College World Series, held every May in Grand Junction. (I blogged about an earlier visit here.) What a wonderful celebration of the game, the earnest young men who play it, and the joys of, if not small-town, then at least small-city, life.

I don't want to wait that long before going to experience it again!

The lovely weather is a big reason they hold the tournament here every year

new pressbox since my last visit; there were new seats, too

fun music between innings, including, of course "YMCA"

Wordless Wednesday: Thankfully not prophetic

 

Some good luck for some hapless boys

As I mentioned last time, I got to go to a Rockies game during a short Denver interlude in my Colorado "vacation." The poor guys are having a miserable year, but the ballpark is beautful, the guys are (mostly) fun to watch...AND, we brought them luck in the guise of a smashing 11-4 victory! Yes, they should pay us to come to games all the time.

Those eleven runs were generated in part by 5 homers by the good guys. The ballpark has a neat feature to celebrate Rox home runs...not as wild as the old Astrodome scoreboard, but more in keeping with the nearby mountain scenery:

fountains erupt when Rox go yard

We got to see another interesting feature of the ballpark on a stroll around the Wells Fargo Club level, where our great seats were thanks to a friend's fortunate status. Here's the control room, not of Cape Canaveral, but where this small army of technocrats operates all the many screens on offer around the park:

this would be an interesting place to work, don't you think?

I really think they have too many of these devices distracting from the game (especially between innings) although I find the out-of-town scoreboard and the strikeout tallies interesting. But I've never seen where the sausage is made for these things before. Fascinating!

One good use of the video board is to show closeups of the musicians playing the national anthem. This night it was a fine brass ensemble...

Altogether a fine, fun evening at one of my favorite ballparks. And in the company of some of my favorite people...

Braving the heat

Anyone who knows how hot it's been in SA lately might be amazed to hear that we were out two evenings in a row at local sporting events this week.

First up was a US Open Cup soccer match between our SAFC and FC Dallas. Yes, our lowly USL team was matched against a team from what passes for the soccer major leagues in our [soccer-ly backward] country.

That's the way this FA-Cup-styled tournament is supposed to work. And we almost pulled off one of the fun upsets that fans of such events live for.

We really outplayed the big boys, and created several more scoring chances than they did, but their defense was always spot on. So it was doubly unfortunate that just after the second half began, we carelessly gave the ball away at midfield and suffered the game's only goal as a result. I think our keeper would have beat theirs in a shootout.

But it was a lovely evening, as you can see, with even a stiff, constant breeze that made the heat much more bearable. So it was fun.

The next night we sweated a lot more (less breeze and more crowded stands) at our token Missions* game of the season.

only in SA: C5 (?) touch-and-goes provide extra entertainment
throughout the game

We always plan to go to more of these fun AA games, but usually end up only making it once. It is somewhat frustrating that a city of our size only has a team at this level, but they have a loyal following and over the years have seen some pretty impressive guys playing for them.

Like this gentleman on the left, who looks unbelievably young on the banner. Especially compared to how he looked about 15 years later when I saw him enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

It's fun that they put the club's history on view like this. (According to Wikipedia, we were a founding member of the Texas League in 1888!)

It's also nice that they were offering dollar beers and hot dogs last night. I'm ready to head up to our seats for dinner in this pic.

Unfortunately we brought bad luck to another local team here. Uneven pitching and sloppy fielding were paired with rather anemic hitting, and the home team lost 8-2. Still a fun outing though!

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*Although the team is officially the Missions, they often take up an alter-ego and we got to see what has become a wildly popular cultural event that started as a marketing ploy. Yes, we are the Flying Chanclas!

On his way back from a beer run Henry was actually held up by a visit from the main Chanclas mascot (an abuela; read the link above for an explanation, of sorts) in the aisle near our seats...

Unfortunately the "matriarch" had turned away before I could snap the photo, but fortunately he wasn't hit by any flying flip-flops. I couldn't find a picture of her to link for you, but she participates in several of the between-innings activities, including chasing kids around the bases, chanclas in hand. Minor league baseball! Gotta love it!

Wordless Wednesday: a dream of spring

B-G-O!

We didn't just randomly decide to go to upstate New York on our annual sib-trip this year. There was a specific motivation.

For the first time in history, a player was going to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Houston Astro. For non-baseball-fans, and even for baseball fans invested in other teams, this might not seem like a big deal, worth traversing the continent for. But for us, it was.

Other players who have worn Astros unis, some even for a fairly long stint, are in the Hall, as you can see on the back of my souvenir t-shirt:

But only the guy at the top of the lefthand column, whose Hall plaque, recently unveiled, is shown above, went in as a 'Stro. And even better, he played all of his seasons with our team. Starting in 1988 and playing until 2008, with one team?! This is practically unheard of in modern sports. You can see a photo gallery of him in action here on the Astros website.

So, when Biggio's election was announced in January, we started making plans. Cooperstown, New York, is a small town sort of in the middle of nowhere, but we found other attractions to amuse us before and after the big day (which was July 26).

And Steve found other amusements on the day itself; having a non-fan in the family actually worked out well for us, since he was able to drop us off and pick us up, eliminating the need for finding parking. Finding seating was another matter, though, since we knew there would be a big crowd and we were not buying close-in seats.

The only way to manage was to get there early. Even though we were overnighting in Albany, to avoid scandalous hotel prices in Cooperstown, we thought it was worthwhile hit the road early. We hit our target time of 9:30 pretty much on the nose and were glad we did, grabbing a nice area right in the center of a sloping berm. Here's the view from our seats soon after our arrival:

Yes, that's the stage 'way in the distance, but there was a video screen and we thought being on the hill would be cooler than being down on the flat area. And this turned out to be true. It was much hotter than Texans were expecting summer New York weather to be, but this slight discomfort didn't spoil the thrill for us. We were so pleased to be among probably the largest group of true Astros fans you could imagine. Memories of Astros-Cubs home games when Cub jerseys out-numbered the hometown unis were erased by the site of all the Biggio jerseys we saw.

this adorable munchkin had a jersey matching his dad's (on the right)

And of course we added to the total:

Although we think Astros jerseys were the most numerous in the crowd, we were probably out-done in the noise department by Pedro Martinez' Dominican partisans. But they were obviously having such a good time, and they put on such a fun show, that we didn't mind.

For such a large and important gathering, the whole feel of the operation was very small-townish. No admission fees or metal detectors, high school kids selling concessions (although an admittedly limited choice of food options: hot dogs and chips. Period! Plus they ran out of water before the show was over!), and families with coolers, balls, and gloves, setting up impromptu games for the kids. Not to say that important matters were overlooked; it was probably the best-supplied operation, porta-potty-wise, that any of us had ever had experience with...

And our four-hour wait for the festivities to begin was very entertaining. From watching the spaces fill up (see below), to watching kids running makeshift bases, to some entertaining videos on the big screen, it was very enjoyable.

Here's a look at the "hillside" we were on, after it had gotten pretty filled up:

And to give you an idea of how much/how little space was left at showtime, here are two shots of the space in front of us, occupied by a family with a very handy canopy-tent...very welcome shade, appropriately decorated:

just setting it up

close to showtime

They could have handled a few more fans, I guess. But it was a good crowd all the same. Estimates I saw said 45,000.

And here's the ultimate fan experience: Bigg giving his speech. The red box is around him and the podium. The sound was fine, though, and we heard every word.

This was really the thrill of a lifetime for fans who've followed the team, more or less, since its beginnings as the Colt .45s in 1962. Although Biggio's longtime teammate Jeff Bagwell deserves to be in the Hall, too, I'm sadly resigned to the fact that he probably won't make it, being tarred with the PED brush that's undeserved in his case. 

However, if my pessimism is unfounded, we'll know exactly where to go to see his induction, what to bring—more water, one of those neat canopy-tents, good chairs (thank goodness we were able to borrow some from Amy's friends this time, as we were woefully ill-equipped for 7 hours of sitting), and more food than a granola bar to supplement the kids' hot dogs. We'll be all set!

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Next up, some of our ancillary sight-seeing and activities.

Multi-trip teaser

Whew! I just got home from a great, but insanely complicated, little vacation. My sister calculated that I'd slept in 12 beds in the just under 3 weeks that I was away from steamy south Texas.

It will take me a while to organize my photos and decide how to tell you about my continent-spanning (almost) journeys. But here's a few views to whet your appetites, and to give you an idea of how varied was the scenery and and how far-ranging were my experiences:

A couple of these shots might give you some clues as to the main event that was the impetus for this unusual vacation. I'll tell you about that next time.

Multi-cultural

Everyone knows that Austin is a hip cultural hotspot. And last weekend we got to sample some of the varieties of culture on offer there with our hip, cultured kiddos.

First on tap (no pun intended, although when you're out with these beer-snobs, there's always something on tap) was the Great American Pastime...

...college style. Long-time readers of this blog will remember my much-enjoyed visits to the Junior College World Series. So it was nice to get to hear that "tink" of aluminum hitting horsehide again.

The UT Longhorns have won a few series of their own, as signage proudly pointed out...

But they weren't so lucky this weekend, losing all three games to TCU, including the middle one that we saw. They were in first place in the conference when we arrived, but probably not by the time we left. However, the game was fun, the weather perfect, and the company delightful, so the score didn't matter all that much.

We did feel a little out of place, not wearing burnt orange, which was the color of choice for a majority of our fellow fans...

...but fortunately that was not held against us. As you can see, we had great seats, right behind first base. Where, we realized after an inning or so, we were pretty close to a celebrity...

note also bright orange "dirt" around the bag

Well, at least a celebrity's relative. That's Kacy Clemens, one of the sons of the [in]famous Roger. He's a freshman at UT, his pop's alma mater. Pretty Kool. (All of Clemens' sons have odd names that start with K, the scorekeeper's symbol for a strikeout. Which he was pretty good at doing to opposing batters for a pretty long time.)

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Thanks to those of my readers who don't consider baseball high culture for bearing with me so far. The rest of the post might be more to your liking.

Saturday we made a return visit (it was a return for me at least) to the Laguna Gloria branch of the Contemporary Austin, a modern art museum that featured installations by Charles Long both there and at their downtown location. Both were very interesting and entertaining.

I was at Laguna Gloria just about a year ago, but the fun sculptures we saw this time are not permanent fixtures there. The installation as a whole was called "Pet Sounds" (not, it seems, totally unrelated to the Beach Boys album of the same name), very appropriate since the oddly shaped metal objects made all kinds of interesting (and sometimes alarming!) sounds when touched. (Except for the gray one on the right, which seemed to be out of order.)

Unfortunately I can't reproduce the sounds, but I hope you can get an idea of the fun nature of the sculptures...I didn't see anyone, of any age, touching them and not smiling with child-like delight!

silent pink...bubble gum?

Travis makes bubble music

Henry and friend

we think the pipes had something to do with the sound production

a duet

Of course the grounds are lovely even without the fun art, and their permanent items are cool, too...

...as well as Nature's contributions to the scene...

A good time was had by all!

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Later that afternoon, Henry and I used our two-for-one ticket to see the Long installations at the downtown museum, and were well-rewarded for foregoing our afternoon naps.

The small museum has two floors and there were related, but also strikingly different, installations on each.

Downstairs were some fascinating and beautiful plastic pieces representing icebergs...

Beyond their striking beauty, they were doubly interesting because of how they were made. The artist took random datasets (for example, 40 years of monthly gold prices, numbers of unprovoked fatal shark attacks since 1900, number of Lamborghinis sold since 1990, for example; like I said...random!) and somehow used a 3D printer to generate the neat shapes you see here from these sets of numbers. 'Way cool!

I stooped down a little to show a more edge-on view

Then, upstairs was an extensive black-lit landscape of more ice-berg-looking objects, but with smoother contours. They were covered with jersey-like sheets (and you could sit on them) and lit by a varying levels of illumination from two video screens showing interesting video effects...more really beautiful and interesting stuff!

The museum building itself is simple in its design, but quite attractive. I was taken by these little green window-like apertures...here seen from the inside...

...and here from out on the street...

Trés hip, non?

That's a long enough post for today, but I've left out yet another attraction (not to mention a run-down of all the hip food consumed). I'll save that for next time.