The final day of the final leg of the road trip season was here and it started at
Buc-Ees, the legendary gas station (don't call them a truck stop, no trucks are allowed) directly off I-40.
I'm not sure words can describe the activity all around when you enter a Buc-ees and that's before considering the mass of items, all of which seem to have the face of a very pleased beaver!
I had a list of things to bring home for Cherie, Rachel, and Posey, including their famous beaver nuggets, which are bigger versions with extra sugar of Kellogg's Sugar Corn Pops cereal.
I found all of their requested items but one and I used the rest of the time to check out the available food options since we would be stopping back for lunch.
The next drive was to Knoxville, home of the Tennessee Volunteers, to stop by Bargain Antiques.
Bargain Antiques is yet another former department store that has found new life with antiques.
I found a few things, a Kroger cloth grocery bag for Cherie, who always likes to pick up bags from grocery stores away from home, a small Green Lantern key chain ( from a booth with ninety percent off that cost me only fifty cents), and a Tennessee basketball program.
What I found most interesting was the parking lot which was so slanted that parking at the bottom of the lot must have felt like hiking up a mountain!
We hopped back on I-40 for lunch at Buc-ees, and because we had stopped by twice, we had some ideas about the food offerings.
Buc-ees has an amazing number of different sandwiches among other made-to-order items and I decided to try two different sandwiches in the smaller size.
I ordered a fried chicken sandwich (similar to Chick-fil-A) and a turkey sandwich.
The chicken was very good and the turkey was good but a bit chewy.
Driving home on a sunny day allowed us to take our time and make a few stops along the way with the best stop at Snoopers Antique Mall in Wytheville, Virginia.
I found two items there, two Topps posters from 1970's releases.
In the 60s and early 70s, Topps usually had an insert of some type in each pack of that season's baseball cards and in 1970, it was posters.
The 9x10 posters were printed on very thin paper and needed to be folded into eighths in order to fit the posters into a standard pack of baseball cards.
As a result, there are few in outstanding shape today as even if you haven't touched them since 1970, the materials are still vulnerable, which is the main reason that I never tried to collect the posters (or the other years that Topps used posters as the bonus prize).
However, for the price (four dollars each), and the condition (the seller had them flat and in plastic), I could not resist adding a Hawk Harrelson ( with the Indians and their red wishbone C caps) and Don Mincher (in the Seattle Pilots uniform that would not see the field in 1970) to my collection.
There were a few other shops in the area but I found nothing that I purchased, so the trip was over other than rolling the final miles out for the trip home.
2024 was a good season for me.
I saw seven new ballparks in Portland, Maine, Worcester Massachusetts, Somerset New Jersey, Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio, Florence Kentucky, and Omaha, Nebraska to raise my total to eighty-nine.
It's starting to become harder to add stadiums with few close enough now for a day trip.
The closest stadium to the north (Non-MLB) is the New Hampshire Fisher Cats (in Manchester) with the exception of Brooklyn and Staten Island as there is no way I'm fighting that type of traffic for a minor league ballpark!
There are preliminary plans to add New Hampshire early next year along with a stop in Boston at Fenway Park, so that would move me to ninety-one but unless a longer trip comes into the picture (unlikely at this writing), New Hampshire and Boston may be the only new additions for 2025.
The closest stadium to the south that I need would be in South Carolina (Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Charleston, or a new stadium opening in Spartanburg for 2025). the nearest to the northwest would be any of the Indiana fields (Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, or South Bend), and the adjacent southwest stadium is even farther away in Memphis!
I've also added quite a few to the visited states list in 2024 with stops in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas for the first time.
However, the states that could be feasible to see for the first time are becoming fewer in number.
I suppose if I ever made the drive to Omaha again and if I wanted to drive somewhat out of the way, I could add Minnesota and/or Wisconsin.
South Dakota is only two hours away from Omaha, so I guess that could happen, and if I ever decided to add a Georgia park (or the new stadium coming to Chattanooga Tennessee), it wouldn't take much to add Alabama but as you can see, the low-hanging fruit has been picked!
It's been a surprisingly good road season with many memories made, and some cannot be repeated.
2025 has a high standard to meet.