4:45 AM. Time to get up. 5:10 AM. Left the house. Made it to the Greensboro airport at 5:34 AM. I already realized that I forgot my newly burned CD in the car. Oh well. There was a long line at the security, which included a woman with a show cat. The cat was grey and had purplpe velvet clothes and a hat on. The hat had white feathers and frillies everywhere. I can't imagine Eukie wearing any of that. I saw a guy from volleyball there. His flight wasn't until 7:30. It was a 25 minute flight to Charlotte. Some guy sitting in the bar in the Charlotte airport was drinking a beer. 7:05 AM- time for a beer? I then waited for my flight and tried to figure out if baseball teams averaged more or less than 9 innings pitched a game. I looked it up and it's less.
Pregame
Mike and Karen picked me up at the airport in the silver Mitsubishi Spyder convertible. Temperature 77 and sunny. We bought tickets for the game. The seats were in the sun behind the Marlins dugout. We hung around the practice fields at the Twins. We threw the ball around some and watched minor leaguers practicing. Mike talked to some people and tried to find out what teams were where. We then went in the stadium. On the way in, they gave us colored tickets for chances at bobblehead dolls. We went through a few times. Mike had orange, red, and green tickets. Karen had orange and purple. I had two orange tickets and a green one. Mike and I did the speed pitch. Mike's low was 39 and high was 51. I tried it three times throughout the game with a low of 59 and high of 76, which was 2nd place in the spring training season according to the kids working there. We sat in the shade for a while, and Mike and I both got Cliff Floyd's autograph on a baseball. Cliff had a very large diamond earring. I had my first beer at 11:45 AM. We then went back outside and saw the Twins players. I got Latroy Hawkins autograph on my ticket, and Mike got three Twins pitchers on a ball. We went in and found our seats in the sun.
Game
LaTroy Hawkins autograph
Found this Bud Selig Memorial on a urinal in the men's roomGame time temperature was 88. By comparison, the day's forecast in Minneapolis was a high of 35 and low of 16. The fans cheered. The Twins won the game 5-2. Karen won a Kirby Puckett bobblehead with her purple ticket. The announcer called it dark blue, but it was clearly purple. It must have been Kirby himself determining the color of the paper. Two foul balls came up our direction, but not close enough to catch. A woman from Wisconsin made fun of me for not catching any. There was a guy with an Ohio State hat walking up the aisle. I started booing him and pointing at him. We then got into it a little bit. I told him that Ohio State would lose to Missouri later that day (which they did). We left in the 7th inning, but we had seen all the runs.
BeachAfter the game, we stopped for Slurpies at 7-11. We then drove to Jim and Cathy's place in Naples. We took the tram to the beach- many birds and animals on the way. The water temperature in the Gulf was a nice 72 degrees. We threw the frisbee and baseball and dove for shells until sunset. I cut up my burned knees on the shells while diving for the frisbee. The sun dropped fast. There wasn't much color to the sunset, just dropped and got dark. We rode the tram back to Jim and Cathy's place. I chased some lizards which were on the walls. We got cleaned up and dressed for dinner, dogs, and bowling.
DinnerDinner was at a place called Porky's Last Stand. It was our last stand before the dog track. We didn't eat much. I couldn't finish the grouper sandwich. The fries were good, but I couldn't finish those either. There was a guy playing guitar and singing in there. Mike put his spare ribs in the trunk of the Spyder.
Dogs
The dog track wasn't so kind to Karen and me. Mike came out a little ahead. There were two gay dogs in race nine. We noticed that they were trying to kiss each other while in the waiting room. Then we looked in the program and saw that they were both male. We stayed from races 7-10 and all three of us won something on race ten. In race 8, dog #2 took a leak on the track.
BowlingLet me first point out that of the three of us, only one of us is in a bowling league. The bowling alley had the neon lights and music. Mike was distracted by the 15 year-old girls dancing a few lanes over. He never broke 100. I had scores of 103, 118, and 149. My brain couldn't help but notice how close these would be to the graph of y= x^2.
The waitress in the bowling alley brought us our first pitcher of beer, but then wasn't bringing the second pitcher, so I had to go get that one from the bar myself. Then another waitress came and cleared out our glasses. It was crazy. We had two full pitchers at one time. We then went into the bar area and played some darts. Mike won all three games. Karen got a dart stuck up at the top of the dart game. We then played some pool, but that ended up being not much fun when I hit the eight ball in first. 2:20 AM. It was only 1:20 AM Central time, but still time to sleep.