Cincy trip

It was an eventful weekend with a 5+hour drive down to Cincinnati for a softball tournament. While the weather can be very iffy in mid-March even 5 hours south, the early reports were for upper 50's and only a slight chance of rain. Well, that wasn't quite the way it turned out, but more on the weather later.

The good thing about going down for this tournament is going to a city with which I have little experience. Maybe 6 years ago I visited the area, actually on the Kentucky side of the border mostly, for the first time with T-Rex Tim for a golf outing. It was a lot of fun, so I was looking forward to visiting with my softball team.

The tournament was laid out in 4-team pools where the top two teams in each pool move onto the winners bracket on Sunday for a single elimination tournament and the losing two teams play in the losers bracket at different fields. The short of it is that we went 2-1 and qualified for the winners bracket where we lost our first and only game.

Now the details. Our schedule for Saturday was 9, 12:30 and 4, which isn't good when your hotel is 30 minutes away. Sure we got a good deal ($50 a night), but the hotel was on the far east side of Cincy and the fields were on the far west side. Normally with two hours off between games, you like to go back to the room and hangout. I still did that, but I only had about an hour in the room. Still, can't complain about the deal.

Our first game was a tight one, 9-8 us going into the last inning. I was up third and had only hit two weak grounders my first two at bats, though one snuck through for a hit. With one out and a guy on first though, I hit a deep ball to right center that split the outfielders for a triple, scoring an insurance run!

But the excitement didn't end there. The next guy up hit a little tapper back to the pitcher and I took a few steps off of third trying to goad him into throwing to third instead of first....and it worked!! I was surprised because it never works and apparently so was the third baseman who missed the bad throw. I jumped up and scored, putting us up 11-8. In the bottom half of the inning, they quickly put up one run and then had a guy thrown out at home plate buy one of our outfielders. Benny Baseball was the catcher who applied the tag I believe. They scored another run to make it 11-10 and then had ANOTHER guy thrown out at the plate, this time on a relay throw from our second baseman. So instead of having to play extra innings, because of the bad throw by the pitcher, we got the win!

There were no other highlights involving me from Saturday as I went 3-9 and struggled with the strike zone and arc of the pitches. Sunday though, despite our loss, I had two walks and ripped a ball to the wall in right center. Unfortunately the fields were muddy from a bunch of rain on Friday night and again on Sunday morning so footing was at a premium and doubles were hard to come by. The 3-3 on Sunday made me 6-12, .500 so not awful for a bad weather tournament, but not acceptable either.

More on the weekend tomorrow.

Lastly, on the way down US-65 through Indiana, I passed by a huge wind farm! Here are the pics from the car.

I hope you can click on them and blow them up. Pretty cool to see hundreds of these things. They are gi-normous!!

On the not so cool side of things, I offer this picture:



This is a house that we pass on the way to the field. I should have taken a wider shot too. They are not wealthy people let's just say and they have this 5' stone cat on the front porch. Hysterical!