I planned road trip for the family to spend a long weekend in Cooperstown, New York. My husband is a huge baseball fan and my three year old loved anything new. I saved a few dollars by booking the trip in the off season. It would be a fun, inexpensive little trip. We would visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Doubleday Field, walk Main Street, and see some sights. On the way we would stop for lunch in the Pennsylvania college town where my husband and I had met ten years prior. After lunch we would go for a quick tour of a local cave and then head for New York. Sounds like a nice trip, right? Wrong.

The first stop in Pennsylvania went well. The weather was surprisingly mild and everyone was having a good time. Afterwards, we jumped back in the car to start the second leg of the trip. It was then that I realized that in my hastiness I had forgotten to take into account how great the climate difference was in Cooperstown.

This first dawned on me as we were making our way north through Pennsylvania. Frozen acres of farmland in PA Dutch country slowly began to morph into the snowcapped peaks of the Pocono Mountains. As we crossed the border into New York, the road too became snow covered. Maybe early March wasn't the best time for this particular trip. Still, we were determined to make the most of our much needed vacation.

We managed to find our hotel and check in without incident. As we settled into our room and decided what to do first, a freezing rain began to fall outside. This would turn out not to be an isolated incident but a fixture of the weekend.

Not to be deterred, we headed out to do some sightseeing anyway. We decided to visit Main Street. Half an hour later, with freezing wet feet, we had already visited all five or six stores that remain open during the off-peak season. We weren't off to a good start but at the hotel that night we vowed the next day would be better. We would be inside, spending most of the day at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. What could go wrong?

We splashed up to the doors of the Hall of Fame the next morning and noticed that there were an awful lot of people waiting outside. Inside we realized that, in my perennial unpreparedness, I had also neglected to notice that this was the day tickets for the annual Hall of Fame game went on sale. The Hall of Fame did turn out to be a fun part of the trip. The seemingly endless line of ticket purchasers snaked through most of the first floor, but the

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