Today was a busy day.
We started out this morning eating breakfast in the hotel with me bring the boys their breakfast up to the room. We left the hotel in Des Moines around 10am.
First stop was an unexpected stop. I happened to see a sign for the Bob Feller Museum. Since this is a baseball vacation we just had to stop. It ended up being pretty neat. The bat that Babe Ruth used as a crutch during his farewell speech happened to be Bob Feller's bat. The bat is on display along with a bunch of other Bob Feller memorabilia in this museum. It also happens to be the last bat that the Babe ever held! Pretty cool, huh? We ended up browsing around the museum for about 1/2 hour then we were on our way.
Next up was the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Council Bluffs, IA. Josh was complaining about how boring it would be. Guess who had the most fun? Yep, that's right, Josh! We ended up spending about and 1 1/2 hours here. If you always stay to your right while going through, you end up stepping chronologically through US railroad history. The most interesting part to me was the building of the Transcontinental railroad. I had read Stephen Abrose's book on the subject a couple years ago. It a really amazing feat of engineering, especially when you consider the tools and technology available in the early 1860's.
Next up was Big Mama's...almost. Josh and I noticed this eatery when on the Travel Channel's 101 best places to eat in the US and figured we should try it out while we were near Omaha. It was a real chore finding it. It ended up being in the middle of some school in one of the buildings on campus. It also ended up being closed already...closing at 2pm while we showed up at 2:20. Doh! So, we decided to go to the local Cracker Barrel instead.
Since we had a few hours to kill before our game, we took the scenic route through the rural parts of Nebraska passing tiny towns of less than 500 residents. One town we passed had a population of 140. When we passed a peewee football practice a few minutes later Drew commented that there was about 1/2 the population right there. Funny!
Anyway, we finally got to our baseball game. The Sioux City Explorers in Sioux City Iowa. They are an Independent team of the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball. It had started to rain a while before the game, so when we got into the stadium we were literally the only people there beside the players and staff. By game start I counted less than 40 people. I'd estimate maybe 100 people in total showed up. Early in the game we were able to get a foul ball, but that's the only ball we got. The players were hardly fouling anything off. Almost like they get fined for fouling them off. Crazy. Josh wanted to see if they had any team card sets, so we went over to the team store. Turns out they don't sell them, but would be giving them away on Saturday. Since we won't be anywhere near Sioux City on Saturday, the guy working the store offered to mail us a couple sets. Very cool. At the end of the 4th inning there was a rain delay that was expected to last an hour, it had been raining pretty steadily for almost an hour so I'm surprised they let it go this long. We ended up leaving since we still had a bit over an hour to drive to our hotel.
Off to bed now since tomorrow will end up being an even longer day than today.
Goodnight.
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