A week of baseball, then a week of hockey, now a week of both (plus a bonus trip to Disney!)
travel
Spring Sports Trip 2026 (Part 2): Hockey in Washington and Canada
After spending 6 days in the 90+ degree temperatures of the Phoenix valley, I went to the low 50s and rain of the Pacific Northwest, visiting with my sister in Seattle. We flew in from Phoenix and arrived at SeaTac just after 9:30pm PDT Sunday evening, but by the time we got to her apartment downtown and were ready for bed it was almost midnight. Time for Week 2 of my epic 2026 spring sports trip.
Spring Sports Trip 2026 (Part 1): Baseball in Arizona
My annual March Spring Training trip has looked a little different the past few years. The last time I actually went out to Arizona for a few days in the Phoenix valley with the Cactus League was back in 2023. In 2024, I went to a local Rays game and then a single game in Goodyear with my wife as part of a Vegas trip instead. Last year, project deadlines at work forced me to cancel the trip out west altogether, but I managed to squeeze in a single Rays game again to keep my attendance streak alive. After last year’s trip was cancelled, I vowed to make the 2026 trip an epic one and finalized travel plans and accomodations in Arizona late last fall in anticipation of going. And then I changed jobs in December and started with zero PTO and an upcoming trip that required 8 vacation days. Oops! Luckily my manager was understanding of the prior plans and I was able to work things out so I’d still be able to go. So let’s do some spring baseball!
Spring Training 2024 (Grapefruit/Cactus Leagues, and Vegas hockey!)
My annual trip out west for Cleveland Guardians Spring Training wasn’t going to work out this year with my siblings. We were looking at the last weekend in March since it happened to coincide with my sister’s Seattle Kraken being in town at the same time to play the Arizona Coyotes (who will be moving to Utah next year!), but then our plans kinda fell apart due to other conflicts. I had resigned myself to just staying local and going to a few Rays games instead, but then a last-minute opportunity made it so that I attended spring games in Florida and Arizona!
Three Days at Universal Studios
We had family coming into town for the July 4th holiday weekend and they wanted to take their kids to Universal Studios (primarily for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter). Since we needed to buy tickets for ourselves, we took advantage of a current Florida resident deal and got 2 free days with our 1-day tickets. As a result, we had those two extra days to go by ourselves and since it’d been 5 years since our last visit, we decided to spend Father’s Day weekend scoping out of the parks before our visitors arrived.
FITCAMX Dash Cam (EV6)
I’ve been really happy with the FITCAMX dash cam in my RAV4. When my wife got her EV6 last year there wasn’t a similar model available so I ended up getting her the Garmin Mini 2 (which apparently I never wrote about here), wired into her rearview mirror housing with a Dongar USB power adapter. Since I didn’t want to use the adhesive mount on her windshield, I used a suction cup mount which meant the camera was mounted a little lower on the glass (below the mirror housing) and thus more in the line-of-sight of the driver. This setup was fine, it just didn’t have that “factory installed” look and occasionally the suction cup would become unstuck in the Florida heat so she’d come back to the car to find the dash cam dangling from its power cable, and putting up a sunshield was also a little problematic.
Well, recently over on the EV6 Forums I saw that the FITCAMX was now available for the EV6 so I immediately ordered one (direct, so it came from China).
Spring Training 2023: Day 1
After two years of no Spring Training baseball trips (2021 was cancelled due to COVID-19, and then 2022 was cancelled due to the MLB lockout), it’s finally time to get back out to the Cactus League! Last time we went out early at the beginning of the season but this year we’re going at the very end … and going to Opening Day in Seattle! Should be a blast …
Seattle Sports Weekend
When my daughter first went off to college in Ohio I told her we’d do a daddy/daughter hockey trip at some point and go see the Lightning play the Columbus Blue Jackets. Then the pandemic happened and the NHL schedule never seemed to align with travel plans. When the 2022-2023 schedule was released last summer it looked like an Ohio away game just wasn’t in the cards so we decided to go a little farther: Seattle. My sister is still a Kraken season ticket holder so she came here to Tampa to see the Kraken play the Lightnig back in December (we won 6-2), and then my daughter and I flew out to Seattle last weekend to catch the Bolts in the Emerald City.
Labor Day Weekend 2022 at Disney
Another summer has passed (although it’s still in the 90s here in Florida!) so it’s time for our annual Labor Day Weekend vacation trip to Walt Disney World. To avoid the holiday weekend traffic that is typical on I-4 over to Orlando, this year we left Thursday evening and checked into our hotel room in the Gran Destino Tower at the Coronado Springs resort.
Kia EV6 GT-Line
Back in March when we replaced my Highlander with the RAV4 Prime, we figured that would buy us (literally) some time for the Ford Mustang Mach-E we had on order to arrive before the late summer/early fall when we would again require two vehicles. But as the weeks passed it became apparent that the Mach-E was not going into production any time soon so we were also started looking around for my wife’s second choice, the Kia EV6.
Again, it’s not a great time to be buying a car (new or used) and we were casting a wide net, talking to local dealerships and ones as far away as Michigan looking for a) an available EV6 GT-Line, and b) the lowest over-MSRP dealer markup we could find. Luck turned out to be on our side again when one Friday evening I found a new Urban Yellow First Edition just a few miles north of where we found the RAV4 (the person who had originally placed the order for the FE apparently didn’t want it after all). We drove out first thing Saturday morning, test drove it, and decided to buy it (and we had to decide quick because when we got back from our test drive, another couple was waiting to check it out, sorry folks!). Actually finding the car notwithstanding, this was our easiest, smoothest car purchase ever, spending just under three hours total at the dealership before driving my wife’s sweet new ride home.