[Baseball] is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. -- A. Bartlett Giamatti I grew up a baseball fan. As a kid I both played and watched baseball. To this day I can name the entire LA Dodgers lineup from about 1982-1986. I don't play anymore, beyond throwing the ball with my son, but I still love to watch baseball, and he loves to play. We went to a minor league game down in Florida a few years ago, the Blue Wahoos, and we stopped by the baseball hall of fame during our trip through upstate New York in 2023. Most of our baseball though has either been Elliott playing on the Washburn little league team or watching it on TV. I have mixed feelings about professional baseball, or at least Major League Baseball. On one hand it has become such a blatant money grabbing machine that whatever soul baseball might have once had, it seems to have left the MLB. The MLB seems to go out of its way to make going to a baseball game a truly horrendous experience, from the price of tickets to the ridiculous water seizures at the entrance. When we were at that minor league game there were signs all over the park apologizing because the MLB would not let them take cash anymore. I wrote then that only diehard fans would put up with the hassle and expensive of MLB games anymore. I stand by that. And I think plenty of people agree. There's been a resurgence of independent leagues in the past decade, even as the MLB turns its back on more minor league teams. The MLB is more concerned with exclusive suites, ever higher ticket prices, and gambling, which together are its major sources of revenue. None of these should have anything to do with baseball. We're lucky that there is an amateur baseball league in this area. Two of Elliott's coaches play and he goes to their games every chance he gets. I think that, combined with the games we've seen in our travels, everything from that minor league game in Florida to an Amish vs non-Amish game we stumbled on in Illinois, has given him a sense of the baseball magic that exists outside the money-driven, analytical game it has become in the MLB. Still, if you're into baseball you want to see the best players in the world playing the game, and that's in the MLB. For us, our "local" MLB team is about an even split between Minneapolis (Twins) and Milwaukee (Brewers), both about a four hour drive away. Since we've been to Milwaukee a couple of times, we decided to head down to explore Minneapolis and catch a Twins game. We've been to Minneapolis twice, but all we ever did was spend the night at a hotel by the airport and fly out the next day. This time we drove all around the city, seeing the sights a little bit in between stops at all the hobby shops Elliott had discovered using Google Earth. Prior to the game I couldn't have told you a single player on the Twins. Even now I only know one or two names. I'm not, and probably never will be, a Twins fan. If you put a Twins game on TV I wouldn't bother to watch, but that's the odd thing about going to the ballpark -- it doesn't really matter. The experience of baseball transcends that. For all my misgivings about the MLB, baseball itself remains the only game I have ever cared about. It's the best game. For many reasons, but I think much of it lies with the rules, the constraints that surround it. Given the right constraints, artistry always emerges. Consider the pace of baseball, which is perfect, not too fast, not to slow. The rules of the game are simple enough to grasp at a glance, and, perhaps most importantly, the outcome of a game is never certain until the final pitch. Then there's the length of the baseball "season", which as Giamatti says in the quote above, is actually perfectly timed to three seasons. It starts, everyone full of hope, in the spring, really comes into its own in summer, and then, the cold reality of October rolls around. Only one team wins the world series. The rules of baseball can be slightly arcane in their edge cases, complex enough to allow for deep baseball nerdry if that's your thing, but the basics are simple enough that anyone can follow it. The rules and the structure of the game also make baseball the fairest game you can play. There's no clock to run down. You can't hold the ball, or dribble off to the side and wait things out. You have to throw the ball over the plate and give the other team their chance just as they did for you, and every time the ball crosses the plate the fate of the game can change. Baseball is also never a one-superstar game. No matter how many home runs your big slugger hits, he only comes to bat 4, maybe 5, times a game. No matter how many people your star pitcher can strike out, he only pitches once every 5 games. A single star player might be able to carry a game every now and then, but a single player cannot carry a team for a whole season. You have to have a team. Perhaps my favorite thing about baseball though is that the most unlikely of players can win a ballgame. The guy who hasn't hit the ball in 25 games straight can nevertheless come to the plate in the bottom of the ninth and hit a home run that wins the game. What really draws me in to baseball these days though, and I suspect this is true for most fans, is the narrative, the endless stories unfolding in real time. Every player has a story, which turns every game into a bigger story, which turns every series into a story, which turns every team into a story, and all these stories are constantly twisting and turning in unexpected ways as the season unfolds. This, I think, is why listening on the radio is the best way to experience baseball if you can't make it to the game in person. The story comes across better on the radio, where there is no picture to distract you. Baseball radio commentary is forever telling stories. In other sports commentators tend to use downtime, if there is any, to analyze plays. There might be some of that in a baseball broadcast, but it's always wrapped in stories -- about the players, about the game, about the team, even about the broadcasters1. You get to know all these people, know their stories, good and bad. You know the story well enough to tell it yourself, and you do. I also love that baseball doesn't take itself too seriously. If a team is down by 15 runs and doesn't want to waste its reserve pitchers on an obvious loss they might ask an infielder to pitch. The Dodgers did that earlier this year with Kiké Hernandez, who then proceeded to do impersonations of all the pitchers on his team, having a good time despite losing. Because at the end of the day, it is a game, the greatest of games perhaps, but still a game. For people I have never met, I know an alarming amount about Vin Scully and Joe Castiglione. ↩

If you subtract out 2020, when everything shut down and we rented a farm house in South Carolina, April 2025 marks seven years on the road in our 1969 Dodge Travco. We left our previous home of Athens GA on April 1, 2017. Our twin daughters were 4 years old. Our son was not yet 2. We spent 18 months traveling, breaking down, repairing the bus, traveling some more. Breaking down a little less and traveling some more. From Florida, across the gulf, through Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Colorado again, Utah, Nevada, California, and then back east through Arizona, Texas again, the gulf coast, the midwest, the Great Lakes. Over the next six years we'd go through 27 states and a smidgen of Canada. We took a short break in 2019 to spend some time in Mexico. But we've never had a home aside from the bus, as we call it. The kids grew up on the road. I stopped writing much about them in the last few years because they are their own people, and can speak for themselves, but I know that living in the bus was an experience I don't think any of them would change for anything. They are who they are in many respects because of how we lived. They've had experiences most of their peers never will, particularly when it comes to education. They've been able to learn from doing rather than just reading. They've seen and touched things that exist only in books for most kids. They know the names of plants and animals because they've seen them in the wild. They know what a ghost town is like because they've slept in one. They know what the Milky Way looks like because they've seen it. They've eaten lunch in the woods where Pocahontas played. They know how a loom works because someone showed them. They know what it's like to be hot and frustrated and bored when the bus overheats and there is nothing to do but wait for dad to fix it. Experience shapes you. Especially the difficult experiences, which teach you resilience and also how to appreciate the good times. When things are hard every little thing becomes a treasure -- a sandwich, a smile, a ride to the parts store. Even grabbing the right wrench on the first try feels like an accomplishment of the gods sometimes. I don't know what they'll do with all these experiences, but I know that experience stays with you forever. I know that life on the road has given me kind, considerate, thoughtful children, which is all I ever wanted them to be. I too would not change a thing. People often ask why we live this way. I could answer that question many ways, probably a different way each day, but a big one would be because traveling reminds you that you're alive. It snaps you out of routines and reminds you that you're more than the collection of habits you've acquired over years, that your days are for more than getting through them, that in fact there aren't that many of them to be had, that each of them is a gift, and that all that really matters is that you are present for all of them, really, really here.

March saw the kids and I head to California to visit my parents again. This time we flew out of Duluth, which is a delightfully tiny, empty airport that knows nothing of lines or hassles. When the four of us went through security we were the only people in the line, and we outnumbered the staff by two. It reminded me of flying in the previous century, back when it was fun. The only real downside was connecting through Minneapolis, which meant we had to wait a few hours for our flight to California. From the air you can really appreciate how flat Wisconsin is, almost like a giant sheet of ice came along and smashed it. California has changed a lot over the last few decades. I really don't recognize it anymore. I was thinking about this on the last trip too. When I was a kid growing up in southern California there was still room for weirdness. I think housing prices have driven out the last of the odd people now, but back then you could do weird things, like build a ship in your backyard. This story is something of a local legend. In the 1970s, in a regular suburban yard in Costa Mesa California, a man, driven by some obsession, decided to build a ship. Not just any ship, but a 118-foot replica of a Revolutionary War-era privateer. In his backyard. It took Dennis Holland 13 years to build the ship. He had to bulldoze his house to get it out and down to the harbor. That is dedication. It was mostly before my time, but I remember it vaguely. It launched when I was 9 in 1983. Later, in high school, when I was rowing with the crew team, we'd see it going in and out of the harbor for charters. Unsurprisingly, even as a kid I was drawn to people like Holland. I never met him, but I have always admired people with the obsessive drive to do the weird things they want to do. Most people in the world would laugh at Holland's plan. Probably many did. He just went and did it. If you want to do something bad enough, you usually can. Holland died over a decade ago, but the ship is still around. When you put something like that into the world, often the world takes care of it for you. Holland eventually sold the Pilgrim of Newport, as he called it, to the Ocean Institute in Dana Point (who renamed it, Spirit of Dana Point). You can still do a half day sail, just like you could when Holland was chartering it in Newport. My kids have been begging to get on a tall ship pretty much since they found out they existed, so we signed ourselves up for a sail on the Spirit of Dana Point. I wasn't expecting much from the sail. Usually on these sorts of things you're luggage, they hand you a plastic cup of juice and stow you in the back. This wasn't like that. This was hands on sailing. The crew of Spirit of Dana Point had passengers raising the sails and steering the ship. We may not have gone far, but four hours flew by and the kids had the time of their lives. Thanks Dennis Holland for having the crazy idea that you could built a Revolutionary War vessel in a suburban backyard and then for actually doing it. Never listen to the people who say you're crazy to build a ship (or live in a 50 year old motorhome). Just get after it. The Spirit of Dana Point was a tough act to follow, but we had fun just hanging around Newport. I took the kids down to The Wedge, where I used body surf. We also went back to the Balboa Fun Zone because Elliott has been talking about it pretty much since we left it last time. Then, after a week of citrus and summertime (and tacos), it was time to head back to the haggis and cider of the long winter.

Around the middle of March winter started to lose its grip on the lake. The end came quickly, the ice broke up just as fast as it had formed, there one day, gone the next, almost precisely on the solstice. For another week great sheets and chunks of ice blew around, gathering on the shore in the evenings and then drifting out into the lake to melt during the day. Toward the end it looked like someone had emptied countless bags of crushed ice into the lake. And then the ice was gone. The snow melted right behind it and the weather turned warmer. The sun felt somehow faintly warmer, and lingered longer in the sky with every passing day. Only on the lake shore did signs of winter linger. And then winter came back for one last storm, dumping some fresh snow overnight. The world oscillated for about a week. Snow came, snow melted away later the same day. Then the day it last snowed fell farther and farther back on the calendar. Rain replaced snow. The world turned to mud, the lake was again free of ice.