The Baseball Road Trip

3 Comments Written by Mike on January 29, 2008 – 12:31 am

I’ve been sitting on writing this for three days now. This is the beginning of something special, and I can’t just rush it along. There’s this thought floating in the back of my head that if I fuck this up at the very beginning, this whole trip is doomed. This, of course, isn’t true. If I’m destined to suffer a miserable fate every time I fuck something up, this trip would be the least of my worries. After all, what if I burn the toast for breakfast tomorrow?

I am not satisfied with certain things. These things include: life, the San Francisco Giants, and people who insist on putting walnuts in brownies. These items are ranked in order of importance (the decreasing kind). The law of averages suggest that the Giants will one day right the ship and that the brownie makers will one day realize the folly of their ways. Life, though? That’s a tough one. Over the past year, it’s become increasingly clear that I need to take matters into my own hands.

Aman and I talk a lot. We don’t go to the same college now, but we shared the same high school. We first met in a math class taught by an old Asian lady who could pronounce neither of our names. While Aman’s name presented an intriguing foreign challenge, I never understood the difficult with “Michael”. I have since shortened my name to “Mike” in an attempt to pacify Algebra teachers across the world. In any case, math class was the beginning of our friendship. Seven and a half years later (a thought scary in itself), we still talk. This occurs despite now being separated by the states of Oregon and Washington, the United States border, and I imagine several dozen Canadian mounties. This is a good thing. The talking, not the mounties. It appears that we are both at the same stages in our lives. At the ripe ages of 21, we are having our midlife crises.

I won’t speak for Aman; he will explain things in his own way and in his own time, so for now let me just explain my own situation. I have good friends, a good job, and I do fine in school. These things are not problems. I like what I do, and my friends are so amazing that I constantly look in the mirror and wonder what the hell they’re doing around me. I figure it’s better not to question a good thing. Everything else, though, I seem to have a problem with. I’m nearing the end of college and an eerie realization has crept over me: my life is on a set of railroad tracks. After I finish college, I will get a job. I will work at the aforementioned job until I am released, bored, or dead. I will buy a house. I will grow old. I will spend my last days wondering what happened to my life. Where did all my time go?

This will not work.

Aman and I discussed the need to do something out of the ordinary. Sitting around and complaining about our problems was getting us nowhere. Our solutions provided little relief. We never experienced a prolonged motivation to do anything meaningful despite the strong desire. Countless methods of increasing productivity proved equally fruitless. We had to set something in motion that was so huge in effort, so epic, that we wouldn’t be able to stop it.

If I am to believe American cinema, every teenager or college student undergoes some kind of rite of passage. A journey to somewhere and through something. In most movies, this involves an awkward relationship, getting marooned in a foreign land, or perhaps battling a human robot. I am unsure if these are good or bad things. Either way, the rest of the idea seemed golden. We decided a trip would be in order. A trip to somewhere unexpected in the hopes of finding that ever elusive life-altering event. Our destination belonged to a place called Europe. You might have heard of it.

Cliché? Sure. Still, Europe was an intriguing idea. It was foreign. Far away. People spoke in funny accents, ate interesting foods, and grew up in a culture nothing like our own. This could be one hell of an adventure, one that we knew friends had already undertaken. It quickly became apparent, however, that Europe is an expensive place to visit. Neither of us are financially secure individuals; I estimate close to $100,000 in student loans between the two of us. Even if we managed to save up $2000 a piece by the next summer, we’d only be able to sustain ourselves for a couple weeks after taking into account airfare and other costs. Contrary to Google Maps, I am not strong enough a swimmer to make it across the Atlantic on my own, either. Still, the idea was good, but the execution needed a little work. We decided to begin saving and figure out the details later. Some time in November, those details came in the form of two text messages.

Over the summer, I had been slowly chipping away at Aman with baseball. I am a fanatic, and he had only a passing interest in the sport. Still, with some persistence, he came to spend some free time catching Giant’s games over MLB Radio. Apparently, it worked. The baseball trip was his idea, and not mine. He sent two fateful text messages detailing what we should do instead of Europe and instantly it became the most amazing idea I’ve ever heard. Fuck Europe, he said. And he was right.

This would be more manageable. We could drive across the country and see baseball games! A fantastic idea: why go across the world when the two of us have barely been out of California? Instead of sitting idly in Europe waiting for something to happen to us, we would be the instigators here. This trip would be legendary in its size and scope. For three months, we would hop from city to city and experience everything from the remote to the metropolitan. Checking out thirty games of baseball ain’t too shabby, either.

We began to narrow down the logistics, keeping our funds in mind as much as possible. We found a website called Couchsurfing, which allows you to host or crash with random strangers across the Internet. A scary proposition at first, we were reassured upon discovering a rating and security system. Aman built up his credibility by hosting several people over the summer, all of which he’s told me have been great experiences. Credibility is a good thing. This way, we won’t get shanked (probably).

Recently, I mentioned the trip to an acquaintance. He laughed and told me his father did the same thing in college. He told me that to this day his dad still talks about the trip. It was a life-changing experience for him. Hopefully, it will be the same for us. Everything is falling into place: we’ve been saving money for months now, we have a website, we have a plan.

The cogs are moving.