We decided to make the long trek to Canada, I mean Frisco, Saturday morning for the Texas Rangers winter carnival at the Dr Pepper Ballpark. The stadium is home to the Frisco RoughRiders, the Rangers' AA minor league affiliate. Jo-Jo had received an invitation to go, so Gee, Jo-Jo, Dondi, Jordan and I loaded up the Camry and headed up there. It was a full day.
The RoughRiders were there selling season tickets to their games, which the Collin County families were snapping up. For us, though, we came just to see the ballpark and get a baseball signed by several Rangers players: Ian Kinsler, Wes Littleton, Travis Metcalf, Kevin Millwood, Jarrod Saltalamacchia and former Ranger catcher and now front office vice president Jim Sundberg.
All of the six players were friendly and signed autographs for about two hours. The RoughRiders and the Rangers had a pretty good traffic flow through the suite where the autographs were happening.
After we got the autographs, we walked around the stadium (an absolutely gorgeous minor league ballpark), then walked on the field, through the dugout and into the locker room. Jordan got to meet Deuce, the Riders' mascot, and Rangers Captain, the Rangers' mascot. He wasn't sure what to make of a person walking around with a horse's head. :)
From there, Jordan was ready to have some more fun. We made a return trip to the Wiggly Play Center in Frisco. Jordan started cheering and yelling, "oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!" real loud when we pulled into the parking lot. (What's most surprising is, he's been there once, and the Wiggly Play Center is located in a standard suburban strip shopping center, so (other than the non-descript sign), there was nothing too exciting about the outside).
This trip wasn't as much fun as the first time we took him last summer. There were a lot of older kids in there who apparently had no adult supervision and overran a lot of the younger kids in there. And the Wiggly Play Center staff was just lazy (both at the front door and at the concession stand there were more than three employees doing nothing, and wouldn't stop doing nothing to help us out -- by helping us out, I mean, "take our money"). Jordan had fun, which was what was important, but we'll find somewhere a whole lot closer and more attentive for our next winter outing.
No trip to Frisco is complete without a stop at the Ikea store, and since Jo-Jo and Gee had never seen it before, we stopped in for a couple of hours. We were ready to buy stuff, but so were about 25,000 other people, so we decided we didn't need $2 shelves and $2.50 knives so much. :)
The drive to and from Frisco is a bear because the 121 Toll Road is a giant parking lot through Plano, The Colony and Frisco (thanks for that, BTW, TxDOT and Gov. Perry), but we made it home in about 90 minutes.
All and all a lot of fun! We do have a few pictures we'll post later.
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