Baseball Roadtrip - Day 6

Today's game was the Milwaukee Brewers vs St Louis Cardinals. But the day began way before that....

The plan was to leave the hotel this morning at around 9am to shop on Michigan Ave and then go and eat some Chicago style pizza. So as you might expect, Michael and Cindy worked until 11am on his work, then we went to Buca de Beppo, because it doesnt get more authentic Chicago than that. We ordered spaghetti with marinara and pizza for lunch. The waitress repeated our order and said spaghetti with Meatballs and we said no just marinara. So of course the spaghetti came out with 2 giant meatballs (Cindy got sad because it reminded her of Callie's.) I told Cindy and Michael that we needed to let the waitress know we didnt order those because it would likely cost more. So the waitress comes over and I'm about to tell her we didnt order them, and she says to us, "You all dont want these meatballs?" Michael said no we're good. So apparently the waitress took that to mean leave them on our table. Michael never touched the meatballs and so we spent and extra $7 for no reason! After listening to the waitress' stories about breat feeding triplets, etc you'd understand why we just wanted out of there rather than try and explain the mistake she made.

We then spent 15 minutes using 3 different iPhones trying to find a Garrett Popcorn on Michigan Ave (only to learn they all closed...not all Garrett's, just the Michigan Ave ones.) Then it was time to leave for the new hotel & car rental place. So here we are in downtown Chicago with all of our luggage, and it starts to rain....great! We made it to the train stop for our new hotel where we noticed it was still raining, so we all agreed that even though it was only 2 blocks, we would taxi it to the hotel. So all the taxis are sitting there in a line at the train station, but each one refuses to take us since the fare would be so low. As a result, we said screw it and just walked the 2 blocks in the rain. As soon as we got to the room we headed downstairs and caught the shuttle to the car rental place.

At the car rental place, the lady helping us was what I'd refer to as a real "Personality Plus" person, meaning she was the worst customer service person ever (see Swingers for the Personality plus reference.) I mentioned to her the whole give me a car with Michigan plates so I can avoid drop off fee. She said no matter what plates are on the car I'm paying the fee. She then assigned us a car. When we went outside we noticed the car she gave us just so happened to have Michigan plates (so I (which means Cindy will) will be calling Dollar Customer Service tomorrow to see if we cant arrange a deal to avoid the $300 dropoff fee.

So we headed to Milwaukee, which was a drive filled with construction. It went fairly smoothly until we got into Milwaukee, which is when I realized that our Magellan GPS aka Maggie was as useless as Marco when it comes to navigating me through Milwaukee to Miller Park (Transalation: we got lost again, but I swear I followed the gps directions.) After about 10 minutes of getting on this highway and then u-turning back the other way; we finally arrived. The atmosphere was awesome in the parking lot. As we were waiting to pay to park we could see tons of cars already parked and people tailgating. I got things started off by threatening to embarass Cindy by saying to the lady collecting the parking fee at the game, "Hey you live up here so you must know a lot about cheese. What type of cheese do you think Mike's feet smell like?"

As for the game: this stadium is awesome, definitely top 3 of the trip. The food is incredible we sampled everything from bratwursts, baked potatoes, nachos made from waffle fries and nacho cheese, baseball cookie, pretzels, and candied pecans. The game was extremely close, we barely missed catching a homerun ball. Prince Fielder, a Mexecutioner great, won the game by legging out a bases loaded infield single in the bottom of the 8th inning (he is big boy.)

The drive home was great until 2.5 miles from the hotel the highway was closed so they could hang a new sign over the highway. We were delayed 20 minutes or so.

Misc Details

- Miller and Coors have merged apparently and so Coors Light was for sale at Miller Park....too bad Mike wouldn't take me up on my offer. (On the Subway today he had his iPod up so loud he didnt hear me offer him $100 and then $200 to simply acknowledge I was speaking to him!)

-Playboy radio, even if free with your rental car, is very uncomfortable for everyone when traveling in the car with your wife and brother-in-law.

-Due to Cindy's current condition, I chose to use the "wide load" lane at all Toll Booths on the trip between Chicago and Milwaukee

-Mike's line of the trip was issued after he failed to buy a souvenier at this game as well. After waiting in line he decided not to get a custom shirt made for $25. He said, "When someone asks me where my souveniers from the trip are, I'll tell them I left my souveniers from this trip at the Marriott's toilet." And then he proceeded to inhale a bratwurst.

-Mike managed to get full from eating 3 separate times at tonight's game

-If you are ever bored and looking for some entertainment, ask Cindy to do her awesome imitations. (warning: it may be hard to tell the difference between her Boston, NY, and Chicago....they all sounded Texan to me)

-A question we pondered on the drive home, Which family had the bigger weekly food bill, The Fielders (with Prince and Cecil) or the Mycoskie's?

-For anyone who doesn't already know this, if you are around Mike and he is eating ballpark food, get him a separate room for himself and his souveniers.

-Bobby, it's ok. Keep dipping your nuggets in your Frosty.

Sorry this is so long...Cindy is yelling at me for writing too much, so adios until tomorrow.