I rented my car through Costco for this trip, because it was strikingly cheaper than any other way I had at my disposal. This routed me through Enterprise, which routed me to my current awesome rental car, a brand new (less than 400 miles on it) black Dodge Charger. This is a very large car. Its got great acceleration, rides as smooth as glass, and cruises very comfortably at high speeds.

The car was important, because today was a day of driving and baseball and driving and baseball and driving. We left on the late side for the first game, in part because we got in late last night and in part because we had a misunderstanding about when to leave. Because of this, I felt the need to get to the ballpark, which was about 100 miles from the hotel (not as ridiculous as it sounds- if we'd stayed near each ballpark we'd have had to change hotels every night. This one is central, sort of) as quickly as possible. And that required driving as fast as possible. That's hard to do in a new place, because how am I supposed to know what constitutes speeding here? The limit on most of the route is 70. So can I go 80? I don't know.

So I just used the follow the fastest car strategy. This turned out to be a little black Acura, who kept zipping around, with me in hot pursuit. So it's the Acura followed by my bigass Dodge, with me occasionally moving in front as well, depending on the situation. This went on for a long time, maybe 70 miles or so. So when I turned off for the game and saw he was not, I felt a little sad. My daughter then saw me start to wave to the guy and started fussing at me, at which point I said, "Look, I'm waving back." She looked and sure enough, the guy gave me a friendly wave as he headed south.

The game was the usual Spring Training mix of things. There were a couple of mammoth home runs and a couple of good fielding plays, but the stuff you remember is more like the 3rd base coach coming over to a front-row fan who he clearly knew, and reaching into his pockets and taking out handful after handful of bubble gum, until he filled the guy's hat, at which point the guy started tossing the pieces up into the stands. Or the umpire coming over to ask a couple of fans how his NCAA Basketball brackets were going. Or the Toronto third baseman coming up behind a runner and giving him a big, affectionate hug around the waste, and then the two of them having a very happy-looking conversation.

The second game was at the almost new mini-Fenway the Red Sox built in Fort Myers. That was a much less informal atmosphere. The game was sold out and it seemed kind of more corporate. We stood to watch the game from behind netting in the middle of a replica Green Monster. It was still good fun and it will be fun again when we do it tomorrow.