Michael Mountain and his Honda Fit will likely go unnoticed by many fans at Miller Park on Monday, but they’re on quite an adventure. Mountain, who lives in Baltimore, is visiting Miller Park as the third stop on a 30 city, 36-day road trip to visit every MLB stadium.
Mountain will put on more miles this week than most people will all summer: He was in Philadelphia on Sunday, will drive from Milwaukee to Kansas City on Tuesday and continue on to Denver on Wednesday before a two-day journey to San Francisco on Friday, where he’ll see the Brewers again. In fact, Mountain will become pretty familiar with the Brewers on his journey: He’ll also see them in Los Angeles on July 30, Atlanta on August 10 and Chicago on August 15.
Mountain was driving across West Virginia on Sunday night when I caught up with him to talk about his massive road trip.
What inspired you to do all of this?
Well, a couple of things, I guess. Obviously, I’ve been a baseball fan for as long as I can remember. My first time at a ballgame was my dad taking me to the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore when I was about 3 years old, so baseball and I go way back.
But the idea for the trip came about five years ago or so. I had just started a new job doing software development at a consulting group in Baltimore called Catalyte. I had never done any professional software development before, so they had a four-month crash course training program for new developers. I was looking for an idea for a software project to do as kind of a side gig, just to kind of hone my skills and have a test project to work on to kind of solidify the things we’d been learning and give me some confidence that I’d be able to cut it. That’s where the idea originally came from for trying to figure out this itinerary.
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I was interested in trying to see what the most efficient way to get around to all 30 stadiums and back to Baltimore would be. So, it really just started out as a thought exercise and a logic puzzle and a way to practice programming skills. But I worked on that on and off for the next couple of years, and I tweaked some things here and there in the program, and eventually when I had it working as well as I thought I wanted it to, I basically said, “Well, the only way to prove that this is actually feasible is to actually go on the trip.” So, about a year ago is when I started taking it seriously enough, doing it for real. One thing led to another, and here I am, making my way out to the Midwest.
You’ve got some travel days on this trip that are ambitious. Going from Philadelphia to Milwaukee is certainly one of them. When you saw the way this worked out for this window of time, were you surprised by the amount of time you’ll spend going back and forth to cities? I know, for example, you’re in Chicago twice with a day of separation (and a trip back and forth to Minneapolis), for example.
Right. I wasn’t too surprised, again because I had sort of been working on this. I had tested the software on the last couple of seasons’ worth of data, so I kind of had a general sense of what a good solution would look like. It’s always a trade-off between driving distance and travel time, how many days long the duration of the complete trip is. By necessity, in order to squeeze into fewer total days, you’re never going to get the MLB schedule to line up perfectly where the city you want to go to next will be the absolute shortest possible distance. So there’s going to be some amount of doubling back on your route. It’s kind of unavoidable.
But I had found, in previous years of checking out the schedule, that it seemed like 34 or 35 days is about the sweet spot in terms of the least number of days without doing any completely ridiculous legs, like having to drive through the night or anything like that.
How many of these parks that you’re going to have you visited before?
I have 13 active parks that I’ve already been to. Fifteen total, which includes the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore as well as Turner Field in Atlanta, which I was able to make it to before they moved up to SunTrust. So, a little less than half are repeats for me, overall, but that means a little more than half are new. There are definitely some parks that I have not been to that I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time.
Is there a place that you’re seeing for the first time that you’re most excited to see?
Several of the West Coast stadiums. Being from Baltimore, it’s always been harder for me to get there. Petco in San Diego is supposed to be really nice; San Francisco as well and Seattle. Those are probably the three most interesting destinations that I’m looking forward to seeing.
You’re driving your own personal vehicle, right?
Correct.
What kind of vehicle is it?
It’s a Honda Fit.
Any thoughts or concerns about putting that many miles on your personal vehicle driving around the country this summer?
Not particularly. We have a history of doing some road trips together. As I mentioned, the company I work for is a software development consulting group, and we have an office in Baltimore as well as in Portland, Ore. I have, on a couple of occasions, taken a temporary job assignment based out of our Portland office and have driven this vehicle between those two in a couple of days, three or four days. So we’ve had some practice at doing long haul treks, not quite of this duration, but I think she’ll hold up just fine. I had some service done before we left, got new tires, changed the oil and all that stuff. So hopefully that should keep us going smoothly until I get back.
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You’ve already run into a challenge with the weather. I saw that you got rained out in Philadelphia one day and had to move the trip around a little bit. How many cities do you have contingency plans for, if you were to run into something like that?
Because I had a piece of software that was helping me do the trip calculations, I had actually pre-calculated for any of the stadiums that did not have domes if the game that I was going to be at got rained out or postponed or whatever; what would be my next best option. So, that was part of the reason why I was able to regroup so quickly and pivot my itinerary from visiting Philly yesterday to visiting Philly today and having to hit Washington, D.C., on the way back. But I haven’t done that for two rainouts on the same schedule. After this, if there is another postponement, I’m going to have to scramble a little bit to figure out what’s going on.
You’re on kind of the first long haul of the trip, going from Philadelphia to Milwaukee. At this point, are you still pretty optimistic about this trip being fun and the long haul being a good idea?
Yeah, I think so. I do enjoy the journey of it. Obviously, I wouldn’t be attempting a trip like this if I didn’t think I was going to have fun, not just at the games but traveling around, getting to explore the country a little bit more and finding some cool places to hang out or to get a meal or whatever it might be. So, regardless of what monkey wrenches might get thrown at me in the next five-and-a-half weeks, I think I will find a way to make it enjoyable.
You can follow along with Michael’s journey, see his planned route and more on Twitter at @MLBRoadTrip.
