Cup Collection: Heart of America & Detroit

I have updated the Souvenir Cup Power Rankings to include cups from the five most recent stadiums I have attended. These are cups representing the following teams: Houston Astros, Texas Rangers, Kansas City Royals, St. Louis Cardinals, and Detroit Tigers. The four cups I acquired on the Heart of America trip are in green font while the cups I will acquire from trips where I attend two or fewer ballparks will all be in black font.

Rankings after the trip to Comerica Park:

1. Toronto Blue Jays
2. Kansas City Royals
3. Philadelphia Phillies
4. Houston Astros
5. New York Mets
6. Washington Nationals
7. San Diego Padres
8. Texas Rangers
9. Oakland A's
10. Los Angeles Dodgers
11. Boston Red Sox
12. Baltimore Orioles
13. Minnesota Twins
14. Milwaukee Brewers
15. Los Angeles Angels
16. San Francisco Giants
17. Chicago White Sox
18. St. Louis Cardinals
19. New York Yankees
20. Detroit Tigers
21. Chicago Cubs

Notes on rankings:

• The Royals and Astros cups are the same style as 6 other cups. I feel this cup style is superior to the other cup styles in terms of structure and space for graphics. Consequently, all 8 cups of this style are ranked in the top 11 of the latest rankings.
• The Rangers have two cups: one that was refillable and one that was not. I bought the one that was refillable and someone in my section left the non-refillable cup. The refillable cup is a 3/4 scale replica of the style of the Royals and Astros cups. I like the design and colors of the refillable cup. The non-refillable cup is pretty non-desrcript but it isn't terrible.
• The Cardinals also has two cups: one for pop and one for beer. These cups are exactly the same style as the Yankee cups. After just using the pop cup, a few creases developed near the neck of the cup. I wrestled back and forth weather to rank the Yankees or Cardinals higher. I like the Yankee pop cup more than the Cardinal pop cup but I prefer the St. Louis beer cup over the Yankee beer cup just enough to rank the Cardinals higher.
• My hometown team, the Detroit Tigers, has a terrible cup. The design on the cup is not bad but could be better by using actual players instead of generic baseball players. The style of the cup is what gives it a No. 20 ranking on the list. The cup is the same style as the Cubs cup and is reminiscent of a large cup that you get at McDonald's or Taco Bell. The only defense I make for the cup is that it was not officially listed as a souvenir cup. However the cups were displayed on top of the pop dispensers to market to guests.

Heart of America: Day 6 and Day 7

Day 6 and day 7 of the Heart of America MLB trip consisted of a lot of driving. On day 6 of the trip I drove from Oklahoma to Kansas City. In Kansas City I met up with my friend Chris and his fiance Amanda to go to the Royals game. I got a hotel outside Kansas City so we could meet up beforehand and carpool to the stadium. The hotel was also close to I-70 so I could get an early start the next day to St. Louis. My ballpark experience at Kauffman Stadium will be written in another blog post.

Day 7, the final day of the trip, was a long, long day. It started off early by leaving my hotel in Kansas City early in the morning. I arrived in St. Louis at 10:15 for the 1:15 game because I still needed to find a ticket. On Stubhub there were slim pickings for tickets and they were over $40. I lucked out and found a girl scalping ticket as I exited the parking garage. I ended up buying a bleacher ticket for only $25.

After I bought the ticket I made my way down to Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. This memorial is home to the Gateway Arch and the surrounding park. Park maintenance and food vendors were setting up a stage and food stands for a concert and air show later in the day. Even though the visitor center was packed I was able to take a tram to the top of the arch without much wait since I was not with anyone else. The tram to the top consisted of several small "pods" that fit five people. It was a little claustrophobic but the trip to the top went rather quick. The view from the top was pretty cool. I got a good view of the river as well as downtown St. Louis. I didn't have time to go through the Museum of Westward Expansion at the visitor center but that might be something for the next time I am in St. Louis. After I can down from the top, I headed out to the Busch Stadium for the game. My experience at Busch Stadium will be written about in a separate post. After the game, I got back on the highway and drove towards Ann Arbor, making it back to my apartment at 2:15am.

Heart of America: Day 4 and Day 5

On day 4 of this chapter, I left Dallas and headed up to Durant, OK where my cousin is a math professor at the university there. It was nice to see him and his wife and they were nice enough to let me stay at their house for a couple of nights. On the first day I was at their house, my cousin gave me a tour of the university campus, his garden, and Lake Texoma. He has a lot of different vegetables in his garden including cucumbers, okra, tomatoes, green beans, and rhubarb. With all of the vegetables from his garden, he and his wife make a lot of different homemade food items including pickles, relish, jams, and wine. Lake Texoma is a large reservoir on the boarder of Texas and Oklahoma. It was interesting to see the flood planes since the the lake's water level fluctuates dramatically over the course of the year (and year-to-year).

The next day, my cousin and I got up early and drove to his secret blackberry location. This secret location is a farmer's field where a fire had come through and burnt some of the farm equipment in the field. After the fire, birds congregated around the destroyed equipment and blackberries grew and spread all over the field. My cousin befriended the farmer and now picks blackberries religiously during the summer to use eat throughout the year and make into wine. There were more blackberries than any small group of people can pick. We picked over 3 gallons of berries in just under 4 hours. In addition to the blackberries, I also left with scratches and splinters on my arms and hands from the blackberry canes -  a small price to pay for the berries. After picking, we had burgers and hot dogs with my cousin's neighbor. Their neighbor had a endless supply of fascinating stories throughout his travels.

Heart of America: Day 3

After 2 days filled with driving I was finally able to get out of my car and experience some culture. I started the day by driving to a FedEx Office store to print out the tickets for the night's game between the Rangers and the Mariners. I then continued north out of Houston to Fort Worth to make a stop at the Stockyards Historic District. I first heard about the Stockyards in a song by one of my favorite honky tonk bands, the Casey Donahew Band. The songs centers on the bar scene of the Stockyards but after doing some research online I found that the Stockyards had much more to offer. Originally, the Stockyard District was a huge stockyard for cattle in the early 20th century. They still have some livestock pens to show what the district looked like back in its heyday. The signature event of the district is a cattle drive through the main street which occurs twice a day. It was pretty cool to see huge longhorn cattle walking through the street. Not quite a running of the bulls but much safer!  There are also western stores, touristy general stores, some small museums, and the world famous Billy Bob's Texas. I went into Billy Bob's and saw their large stage and their hall of fame with handprints of famous country artists.

After the cattle drive, I headed towards Dallas to Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. There I met up with my friend, KB, from college. It was nice to see her because she was our unofficial 5th housemate last year. KB also let me crash on her couch for the night. On the way to her apartment I went by the Dallas skyline. It was a lot bigger and brighter than I had expected. While Fort Worth may still have the cow town atmosphere, Dallas is more of the modern-day city.

Heart of America: Day 1 and Day 2

There was a lot of driving on the first two days of my trip through the Heart of America. On day 1 my goal was to drive as far as possible to leave me somewhat rested for attending the Astros game on day 2. I hit patches of rain in Fort Wayne, IN, southern Illinois, and Northeastern Arkansas. I finally called it a day in Little Rock where the hotels were rather cheap and near the highway. The only two stops of note on the day 1 drive were Cairo, IL and at a barbeque place west of Memphis, TN. Cairo, IL appeared to be an old river town right on the Mississippi river but many of the buildings are shut down and roads are closed off. I had a tough time finding a gas station and the gas was very expensive. I only put in a couple dollars worth of gas and managed to find a much better gas station across the Missouri line. I had a brisket sandwich and a couple of sides at the barbeque place outside of Memphis. It was good and definitely hit the spot.

Day 2 started off with a southern staple: breakfast at a Waffle House. There are no Waffle Houses in Michigan but they are everywhere in the south! I then drove through Texarkana on my way into Texas. My GPS had me take some back highways to get to my hotel I booked the night before outside of Houston. This back highways were pretty comparable to the state highways in Michigan but the speed limit is 70 MPH, in some places 75 MPH. I had lunch a local chain called Whataburger. The burger was good for a fast food place and I liked that it was freshly made but I don't see a big difference between Whataburger and McDonald's. I checked-in at my hotel on the north side of Houston, bought a ticket last minute on Stubhub, and got it printed a Staples a block away. I then headed down to downtown Houston for the ball game for my first game in over 2 weeks! It was nice to get back into the swing of things and my experience at Minute Maid Park has already been published.

The Road: Heart of America

After a detour from my ballpark trip, I am on the road again to cross off 4 more stadiums from my list. I am headed down the middle of country and making my way back up stopping in Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, and St. Louis. This trip will take about a week and is my last vacation before I start work next Monday.

Today I am going to begin making my way down to Texas. I am splitting the 20 hour drive into two days. The second day will conclude by attending a Astros game at Minute Maid park. The next day, I will make the drive north to Dallas and meet up with a friend from college. We are then planning on going to the Rangers game on Tuesday, July 2nd.

My next stop will be in southeast Oklahoma to spend a couple days with my cousin who is a professor at a university down there. I don't know exactly what we will do but we have talked about going fishing one of the days. After Independence Day, I will continue with the final two ballparks on my trip. I will head to Kansas City for a night game on July 5th and then cross Missouri for a Saturday day game in St. Louis. I will meet up with a friend from high school and his fiance at one of these last two stops but we are not sure which one yet.