They built it...so we showed up

While sitting in our weekly staff meeting (and multitasking), I was alerted that DCI Managing Editor Mark DeLap was actually talking to me during the meeting. To be honest, this wasn’t an isolated incident during the staff meeting, but what DeLap was suggesting was something that I found to be interesting.
A couple weeks ago, I took a trip from Rochester down to St. Louis and Kansas City. As a majority of my columns have been bashing the Minnesota Twins for being awful or setting myself up for optimistic disappointment with the Vikings, he thought that a good way to change things up would be to talk about my trip and the things I saw along the way.
At first, I was uncomfortable with the idea. For me to use a page to shove my vacation in the faces of our readers didn’t seem like a great concept. However, I then thought about why we go on vacations. It’s not to brag about them when we return, it’s to share the experiences that we had and see something that we don’t normally get to see. With that, I wanted to share my experience with all of you.
The first leg of the trip was an eight-hour drive weaving through the backroads of Iowa. While my experiences of the state included cornfields, Ames, Des Moines and more cornfields, myself and my co-pilot Blake decided to make a pitstop at the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, Iowa.
To see a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield is bizarre, but it’s also sentimental because of what the movie meant to so many people. It represents the connection of that the game of baseball has throughout generations. It’s why grandparents sit down and tell their kids of how they saw Mickey Mantle play and someday I’ll tell them about that time Joe Mauer had “bilateral leg weakness.” But, I digress….
While I wouldn’t recommend planning a trip to strictly see the field, it was a nice breakup of the trip and it was an opportunity to see the set in real life. I also decided to run around the bases and scream “And we’ll see you tomorrow night!” which apparently was the sign that we needed to leave.
When we reached our first destination of St. Louis, The Gateway Arch almost represented a sign of relief, but was very cool to see. Of course, this also represented the first main stop of the tour: Busch Stadium.
As someone who attends games frequently at Target Field, I can say that the lack of bells and whistles, along with closed concou