Todd Orr

Greetings everyone - this is our penultimate blog post covering our time in Chicago and Indiana. We had a Saturday night game on August 26 in Milwaukee and plans for the White Sox and A's game on Sunday afternoon (August 27) in Chicago starting at 1:10.  Thankfully, the drive from Milwaukee to Chicago isn't that long, but we did run into some rough Chicago traffic on I-90 on the way to the Southside.  Even with the traffic, we still arrived an hour before the game so we could walk around and view the monuments outside the stadium.  Our seats were on the first base side in the upper deck per picture on the left on a beautiful, sunny 71 degree day.  However, we lost our sun by the second inning so in the 5th inning we moved over to the third base side to keep soaking up the sun. The coolest thing we saw at Guaranteed Rate Field (I prefer to still call it Comiskey) was all six of the Chicago Bulls NBA championship trophies from the 1990's on display.  Since the Whi...

 Greetings from Milwaukee!  Recent blog posts have been short on baseball, but we'll remedy that with the next couple of cities. On Friday, August 25, we drove from Eden Prairie, MN to Milwaukee.  On Saturday, August 26, we had the day free before the Brewers night game.  We decided to get our culture on and visit the Milwaukee Art Museum which is located downtown right on the shores of Lake Michigan.  The museum has been around for years, but in 2001 they added Windover Hall designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.  This hall is Calatrava's modern interpretation of a gothic cathedral with flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and a 90 foot high glass roof.  It's topped off by its signature wings (see picture to the left) which are a moveable sunscreen with a 217 foot wingspan.  We were able to catch the wings coming down while we were there.  Very remarkable.   We are hardly art snobs, but we thought the collection was very goo...

Greetings from Minnesota.  It may not seem so from this blog entry, but we're actually getting closer to home and nearing the end of our trip (and the end of filling your inboxes (spam or otherwise) with these updates). On Sunday, August 20, we left Bismarck, North Dakota and took the long ride to International Falls, Minnesota.  Along the way, we stopped at Itasca State Park to visit the Mississippi Headwaters.  The Mississippi River begins as a stream out of Lake Itasca before going 2,500 miles to the Gulf of Mexico.  The picture on the left is me on the first bridge across the river. We made it to International Falls on Sunday evening.  Most of you, like me, only know International Falls from occasionally seeing it on the weather report with the coldest temperature in the continental U.S.  FYI, since Jan. 1, 2023, there have been 33 days with the temperature below zero (F) with the lowest being 36 below zero on Feb. 3 and the last being on April 7!!...

 Greetings from North Dakota - let me know by email response if you've ever been to North Dakota before.  We came one here once in 2013 from the Black Hills in South Dakota so we could say we'd been in the state.  This time we spent 3 nights here. We left Shelby, Montana on Thursday, August 17 and drove to Williston, North Dakota.  That's 7 hours of driving time - almost entirely flat and surrounded by wheat fields with many farmers out running huge combines across their fields  It's an amazing operation. As we got into North Dakota, we started to see a lot more oil production (see picture on left which combines wheat fields with oil pumps).  Williston, ND was the epicenter of the North Dakota oil boom that peaked about 10 years ago with the advent of fracking.  Williston's population went from 12,000 in 2010 to 27,000 today with all the accompanying problems associated with such dramatic growth.  Things have settled down now in Williston and we e...

Greetings from the great state of Montana.  Now that our game in Seattle was done, it was time for us to start heading east. On Saturday, August 12 we drove from Seattle to Spokane.  Beyond the striking differences in the climate from west of the Cascades to the east, there was not too much interesting on the drive.  However, we did notice the exit sign for the town of George which proves that someone in the state of Washington has a sense of humor (if you don't get it, say the name of the town and state together). On Sunday, August 13, we picked up our son Michael and his long-time girlfriend Kathleen (Kat) at the Spokane airport.  There's a long backstory as to why they flew there, but we were glad to meet up with them for our journey to meet Kat's parents and then visit Glacier National Park. Michael and Kat have been living together in Portland for several years, and we've talked about meeting Kat's parents - Orin and Terri Kendall who live in Plains, Montana....

 Greetings loyal readers - while this blog is titled Seattle, we spent the better part of a week in the state of Washington, with a few twists and turns in our itinerary - as you will see. On Monday, August 7, we left Michael and Kat's place in Portland and headed up the Columbia River Gorge on I-84.  We've been in the gorge a number of times and it's fantastic.  We crossed the Columbia at Bigs Junction and headed up past Yakima into central Washington on the east side of the Cascades.  The picture on the left was taken as Melinda was driving on Highway 97 - it's a bit hard to see but this is Mount Adams which is second highest mountain in Washington at 12,200 feet.  You can't see the whole mountain because it's covered in a large cloud - on a clear day.  It's as if the mountain created its own weather.  The rest of our drive took us to Chelan, Washington (population 4,400) at the south end of Lake Chelan.  BTW, Chelan is the home town of Joe Harr...

 We spent six days in Oregon with no baseball and no national parks.  We thought we might go into withdrawal, but we ended up having a great time. On Wednesday, August 2, we left California behind and drove into Oregon.  Gas prices immediately dropped by 70 centers per gallon.  Our plan for this day was to drive up the Oregon coast as far as Florence, Oregon.  Once we got into Oregon we went to 8 different viewpoints on the coast in the Samuel Broadman State Scenic Corridor - a 12 mile stretch of the coast   Each was beautiful and Melinda in particular loved the dramatic scenery.  The picture to the left is of Natural Bridges - these arches were formed by the waves. We stopped for lunch at a viewpoint next to Kissing Rock - that's Kissing Rock behind us in the picture to the right.  We decided not to share the other make-out selfies.  After lunch, we continued to stop at additional viewpoints along the coast.  We were having a great...