There are times, on my morning drive to Diamond‘s offices in Hunt Valley, that I reach the Shawan Road exit on I-83 and, for a brief moment, I feel like I should just keep going. I’ve no idea where I go or what I’d do when I get there — wherever there is — but the wanderlust is there, lurking, waiting.
It’s nothing to do with the COVID pandemic; I like to drive and, even before the pandemic, I didn’t have many opportunities to do so. (My April 2019 not-quite-a-week vacation to North Carolina was my first break from Diamond in almost a decade.) Sometimes, you just want to go.
If I were to win the lottery, I have dreamt of a baseball road trip, hitting as many major league, minor league, and college stadiums in a single summer as I possibly could. Start in February with spring training, end in October with the postseason. It’s not a realistic dream — and I’m not even sure how it would work with my visual impairments these days — but it’s the platonic ideal road trip for me.
More realistically, I’d love to go to Canada. I’d like to see Montreal, where decisive battles in the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War were fought. I’d like to see Halifax in Nova Scotia. And, for no reason I can articulate, I’ve long wanted to see Cape Breton Island.
As far as I know, I have no familial connection to Halifax or Cape Breton Island — I do to Montreal — but I’d just like to go. It’s a pretty land, and I’d like to see it.
Go in late summer — late July, early August. Drive the back roads, stop in small towns and ask for directions, sit out under the stars and enjoy losing myself in the night sky.
More realistic than eight months of baseball road tripping, that’s for sure.
Not happening any time soon, mind you.