We had finally reached our day to return home. We’d had a lot of fun, but we had to head home. We did have one more game to see. Our trip home would take us past Port St Lucie which is the Spring Training home of the New York Mets. I had gotten us tickets with our travel package to see that game. We checked out of our hotel and headed for Port St Lucie.
I was prepared for a lot of traffic once we got close to Port St. Lucie. I had read several discussions online about how terrible the traffic and parking was at Tradition Field (home of the Mets). I had called up directions on my phone to know what exit to get off at, but it wasn’t any problem finding it. The traffic was backed up on it all the way onto I-95 North. Turns out that after you exit, there is a left turn on the road leading to the stadium which causes the issue. Fortunately, we’d left early in anticipation. We traveled on the road to the stadium and we glanced about for places to park that were not right at the stadium with no luck. Turns out Tradition Field has a huge grass parking lot in front of the stadium. It was no problem parking but I could see potential issues at departure.
I honestly feel Tradition Field is a nicer ballpark than Roger Dean. They have nicer seating areas including a large grass berm past the right field fence where families could spread out a blanket or lawn chairs to watch the game. They have a better scoreboard as well. We had great seats but they were right in the middle of a bunch of Mets fans. I heard a lot of the “New York accent” for most of the day. The Cardinals jumped out to a 2-0 lead on an opposite field home run by Matt Adams. Jamie Garcia threw 3 2/3 shutout innings before being replaced by Mitch Harris (the young man who was at our dinner Saturday afternoon). He gave up a two run homer to tie the game. The Cardinals relievers coughed up five runs ending with a 7-2 loss. Then, the real fun began. If you can envision several thousand cars trying to leave at once with no marked lanes for exit and no one directing traffic until you reach the exit from the lot to the street, you can see it would be chaos (it was). It took us over 40 minutes just to get out of the lot. I wound us out the back way to I-95. We spent the night in Ocala and watched several conference basketball tournaments.
The next day we got up and headed out and I really banked on missing rush hour traffic. Unfortunately, there was some sort of issue about an hour or so before we got to Atlanta that backed up traffic well before it should have. We got to Atlanta at about the worst possible time. It took TWO hours to get through the city and points north. It made us lament (like Donna and I always do) as to how people that live in a big city can handle traffic like that day in and day out. We grabbed some Krystal and then checked into our hotel. I scanned the cable TV selections to try and find the SEC Network (to watch the UK –Alabama game) with no luck. One disturbing thing is that not a single hotel of the five we stayed in had SEC Network. Fortunately, I was able to stream the game on my laptop. Kentucky won easily over Alabama again.
We got up the next morning and headed home. I was tempted to at least look at going to see Kentucky at the SEC tournament on Saturday, but decided we needed to get home at a decent hour.
We’d had a fabulous time on our trip. We are at least considering making it an annual trip. If you are a die-hard Cardinal fan, I would recommend you try it at least once. Around the first of the year, there are Spring Training vacation packages offered on stlcardinals.com, so I’d recommend looking for those.
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