Spring Training - Part 1

For several years, one of the things I’ve really wanted to do is go to see the St Louis Cardinals at Spring Training. I’ve never been able to arrange it. The Cardinals offer spring training vacation packages and I’ve always dreamed of going. Our 30th wedding anniversary would be in March. I talked with Donna and I said we’d go anywhere she wanted for our anniversary. She said “You’ve always wanted to go to Spring Training so I want to go to Jupiter Florida”. I of course thought that was a wonderful idea. I have the best wife in the world. I went ahead and bought a Spring Training package for the first week of March so we’d be going to SIX Cardinal games.

We left out on our anniversary (March 1st). We drove to McDonough Georgia. It’s a little south of Atlanta and we hit quite a bit of traffic but made it through unscathed. The next day we drove to Kissimmee to stop for the night. We went to Wednesday night Bible study at Kissimmee church of Christ. I used to go there regularly when I went to email conferences in Orlando. Several people actually said they remembered me. We heard a good lesson from Acts 19 about Paul and Ephesus. We stopped at Dairy Queen for ice cream afterwards.

We got up and headed for Jupiter the next morning. We got to Jupiter in plenty of time for the game. The Cardinals play at Roger Dean Stadium there. It is right next to Florida Atlantic University. They have parking for the games at a pretty reasonable price (6.00) that is only a short stroll through their campus from the stadium. We got there no problem.

Roger Dean Stadium is a nice stadium. It seats about 6800 people. There really isn’t a bad seat in the house. Our seats were in the 2nd level right behind home plate. We had a great view of the game. We also experienced something we hadn’t in quite some time. We got hot. The temperature was in the 80s. I loved it. I ended up getting Donna a cherry Italian ice to help her cool off. The Cardinals share the stadium with the Florida Marlins, so they would be playing. Tyler Lyons started for the Cardinals. He gave up a home run to the second batter. That ended up being the only run he gave up over three innings. The Cardinals tied the game in the bottom of the first on a triple by Tommy Pham and an error. They took the lead with two runs in the 2nd. The Marlins tied the game in the 6th on another home run and an error. The Cardinals scored the winning run on a wild pitch in the 7th. They brought in a young pitcher whose name I couldn’t pronounce named Dean Kiekhefer. He mowed them down in the ninth to get the save. We walked back to our car and headed to our hotel.

I had gotten us rooms at the Homewood Suites which was about a mile away. They had a pretty decent dinner for free that evening so we were able to just stay at the hotel for the evening and relax.

In my next post, I’ll let you know how the next few days of our trip went.