All good ideas and expensive undertakings are thought of within seconds. Well, maybe not, but this one was. My sister and I decided to tour all of the Major League ballparks on a whim. Of course we're big baseball fans, and like most baseball fans, we've mulled over the idea of doing this for a couple of years, but never made any concrete plans to do so. As most recent college grads do, we dreamed about hitting the open road, visiting every ballpark and seeing all of America the summer after graduation. While that's a nice thought, it didn't exactly work out that way. Things like law school, jobs, life, needing money to do such things got in the way of a summer long tour of America. In a quick re-grouping session, and I mean quick, we hatched an idea to see every ballpark, when it best suit our schedule.

If it weren't for my sister, Steph, getting a new car, this might not have ever happened. Last summer, right before Steph was about to start her second year of law school out in Iowa, she had gotten a new car, one that she needed to drive out there. Being the good sister that I am, I jumped at the opportunity to drive out there with her, excited not only for the fun road trip, but for the extra time I got to spend with her before hundreds of miles separated us for another couple of months. While searching for fun things to see along the way, we discovered how close we were to so many ballparks. We decided it would be nice to try to catch a game if the team was in town.

As if almost simultaneously, a light bulb went off in both our minds, instead of hoping the teams were in town, lets make sure of it! For every future road trip we go on, a baseball game MUST be included. It was decided that the best route to take was to stop in Pittsburgh, then off to Chicago for a day or two, where I'd then fly home and leave my sister to dazzle the University of Iowa's Law School program for another year.

It's almost been a year since we've come up with this idea, and we're in the midst of planning our ninth stop on this trip. We are nothing if not efficient. Before this idea came to fruition we had already seen Yankee Stadium and as lifelong Met fans, we've seen Shea Stadium more times than I can count as well as, of course, Citi Field. The first real ballpark that we went to on our tour was Fenway Park, a couple of weeks before this thought became a reality. As a Red Sox fan, I've been DYING to see a game at Fenway since I can remember. I got some friends together, and along with my sister we went up to Boston for the weekend and caught a game at Fenway. It was one of the best experiences of my entire life, definitely in the top 10 best sports moments of my life and I think it had a lot to do with our decision to go to other ballparks. We had such an incredible time at the game, and in the city of Boston that we figured it had to be fun to do this in every other baseball city.

We started our tour of parks on the highest of high notes, three of the best parks in all of baseball Fenway Park, PNC Park and Wrigley Field. To date, we've also been to Target Field in Minneapolis, Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, and Nationals Park in Washington D.C.

Despite the fact that we've been doing a fine job chronically our experiences, between saving the tickets, buying postcards, making scrapbooks, saving ice cream helmets from every stadium, I thought it would a fun idea to write about each experience, so I can always remember exactly what it was like, and what was going on in our lives when we visited a particular stadium. I'm a little late to party as we've been to a bunch already, but I'll do my best to re-create those moments. When possible I'll add a couple of pictures from each trip and a ranking of the stadiums after each visit.

First stop on our tour of stadiums: Boston's Fenway Park