A few weeks ago Jodi and I took the family to Arizona for a weeklong vacation. On this vacation, we took one day to make a spring training day at the Mariners facility in Peoria Arizona. The following stories all took place on this day.

Grandma and Papa watching Hattie for the night so we can go on this adventure. We take off in the “papa car” (Keenan talk) which is a white Tahoe Denali, and head our way to Peoria. Just having upgraded to my iPhone and giving it a shot on this trip, I ask Siri how to get to Peoria, The voice recognition is not perfect yet. We end up at the Glendale facility a few exits away from the Peoria facilities. We get a tour of what is Peoria Arizona. A few wrong turns results into a few biting arguments which turns into “why did we even try to do this?” conversations. But with a little luck we did end up finding the parking lot and some super happy friendly staff helped us park the rig close to the stadium.

The staff at the stadium is by far the nicest friendliest happiest place I have ever been. On the walk up we spot a giant concrete baseball with the Mariners logo on it and decide we need to take a family picture, a wonderful lady stops us, grabs my phone, and continues to take five or six photographs of us to make sure that we get the family photo we’re looking for. I wish I caught her name, I want to thank her publicly, but I did not. I am so sorry, but the entire staff should get credit. After that, I walk up and buy the tickets we need to get inside and proceed over to the security lines. The man who checked our tickets and looked at our bags asked us if the cooler we brought in was for the baby, the baby referring to was Keenan, which Jodi absolutely loved. Keenan hasn’t been our baby lately so this was a treat.

We walked through the stadium and see all the wonderful food stands, the new play area was amazing. It’s a pirate ship with the crows nest, plenty of rock walls, stuff to jump and play on, splash park, etc. Keenan had a blast, I had a lot of fun too. Mom took lots of pictures.
From here we went to find our spot on the lawn. Got a good view of the field, and claimed our spot by throwing down the blanket and bag. This is when we decided to get the food.

It’s a fairly long walk up to the food stands, and this is fair style food stands. You know what I’m talking about, five or six tents back to back and side to side, all offering different varieties of festive food for the moments. Keenan wants a corndog.

Walking in we saw the sign that said foot-long corndog’s, so that’s where we go. There’s a bit of a line, and the guy in front of us orders up to cheeseburgers. Here’s where the cashier taking his money yells back to the cook “TWO REGULAR WITH CHEESE!” The guy grabs his sodas and moves on to the pick up side of the booth. Now the cashier sees all 28 inches of Keenan and asks directly to him, “and what would you like sweetie?”

Keenan throws his head back, finds that diaphragm voice, and does his best to emulate her cook call back, “ONE CORNDOG!”

That cashier laughed, the folks behind us laughed, the cop at the coffee stand laughed.

He gets the corndog, and I swear it’s longer than a foot long. My boy is proud to walk back to the outfield with this thing. He’s got his Connor McGregor strut going on past the T-ball court, thru the playground, and around the beer garden canopy.

(This is where I went live on Facebook, there’s a great video of him walking up with the Great Dane of corn dogs.)

A few balls come close but we never did catch any home run balls. By the 7th inning stretch, Keenan is close to out and it’s clearly time to go. It’s Wednesday, I’ve been near In&Out for 4 days and haven’t got my Double Double Animal Style Whole Onion yet… we gotta stop on the way.

We order a couple extra burgers for the folks and head back to the house. It’s about midnight by now, Keenan is snoring in the car seat, and we miss the street we were supposed to turn left at.

A couple blocks down, we see a shanty drive thru liquor stand that we can U-turn in. Head back to the light, and Jodi takes the free right. The police officer at the light runs the red and gets on our butt! Jodi sees him but he’s in my blind spot, so she knows we’re getting pulled over in a second and I’m telling her to relax and she’s overreacting.

I’m usually wrong in these situations, now is no different. We pull to the shoulder and get to explain the drinking dynamics of our family outing… A bag of burgers and Cactus League baseball hats pretty much tell the story, Jodi hasn’t had a drink in years. He asked if we were lost, the neighborhood we came from has a certain reputation, and advised us to drive carefully back home.

I only rubbed it in her face the rest of the drive.