Spring Training

[familytoad]

Skip, thanks for writing about your experience !

I am intrigued by the Grapefruit League, although one thing about The Cactus League is the close proximity of the 10 different fields. Traffic is a bit nasty but they are all within 40 miles of each other, tops.

Not being familiar with Florida, I am curious as to how much driving and distance you needed to cover to watch all those games...
We try to centralize our hotel stay, one headquarters. Not sure if that's possible in Florida if you want to see multiple venues?

[Nashvol]

Hi Brian,

We stayed at the Bay Harbor Hotel in south Tampa and I would recommend it. It's not a great hotel, but more than adequate and with easy access to the ballparks we visited. The farthest game was about 40 miles away and we allowed plenty of time to walk each venue before the games.

One of our guys had experience as he is a sportswriter and had made several trips before. Not only did he plan each day for us, he did all the driving which made it easy for the others as the traffic was something else depending on the time if day.

Set aside time to visit Clearwater Beach, too; it's beautiful there.

I'd recommend doing it like we did since we didn't have to pack up every day or two. That's why we hope to visit Arizona next year due to the proximity of ballparks.

In the future we may try to go to the east coast of Florida but I'm sure there will be some moving around.

As a side note, each venue we visited this past week was rained out yesterday (Saturday), so we just happened to hit each park at the right time.

Skip

[familytoad]

Awesome, thanks again Skip.

I cannot say that I will do Florida instead of Arizona , but I don't get to see my Phillies by only going to AZ...and my wife's sister lives near Clearwater. I think Arizona still gets my vote.
Still...it's intriguing.

I think we should lobby for a Net 54 meet up in AZ next season for a social.
Our grassroots effort could start with a few of us and eventually grow to a festival of epic measures.

(I wonder if a baseball card show would be successful during Spring Training, as I'll bet there are a lot of collectors who do this annual pilgrimage)

[packs]

I went to Spring Training in Arizona 2 years ago and went to Florida for almost a decade before that. My last trip to AZ was my first, but I enjoyed it so much more than Florida. All of the camps are less than an hour from each other and that means plenty of multiple stops in a day. You just can't do that in Florida.