Day 34

Today was our first of two back-to-back free days, but it wasn’t really free from baseball at all. We didn’t have a MLB game on the schedule, but we did have a college World Series game!

  We left Minnesota with a bit of a plan. We could have seen Field of Dreams, but that would have added on another 3 hours to our trip. The other option was to just drive straight to Omaha. We decided that 3 hours was a few too many. We stopped in Des Moines for lunch and went to a place called Zombie Burger, at our friend Alexa’s (an Iowa native) suggestion. It was decked out in all things zombie. They specialized in crazy shakes and burgers, some complete with buns made out of mac n cheese. We enjoyed our burgers, fries, and cereal shakes, and ate way too much before getting back in the car for the rest of the ride. 

We spent some time at Tim’s house before going to our third meal of the day at Village Inn to meet up with some of his high school friends, Pat and Hoover. On Wednesdays, you get free pie with any purchase, so we got some pie. It was fun to see some of his old friends. We also got some great insight on where to find a Hawaii license plate. We have been playing the license plate game over the trip and the only one we were missing was Hawaii. It turns out, Creighton University has a very high Hawaiian population, and a lot of them bring cars here. 

  With dinner and our new found license plate information, we went to the World Series game. Through Tim’s dad’s connection with Union Pacific, we got parking, great seats, and dinning passes (for meal number 4). When we walked into the dining hall, we were all too stuffed to partake, but they had a full cooler of soda and water, so we frequented that. 

It was the final game of the College World Series, Vanderbilt against Virginia. Virginia was the underdog, and we were conveniently sitting in their section, so we cheered for them. Virginia came out with the win (4-2), the first World Series title for their school, and they did so with a relatively young team. It was a fun game, but the college games move a lot slower than the professional ones. 

  After the game we drove over to Creighton to meet up with our friend Erik. Erik is currently a law student at Marquette, but completed his undergraduate degree at Creighton. It was nice to catch up with him and get a late night tour of the campus before driving back to Tim’s place for the night. While on the tour we saw some nice buildings, some cool statues, but most importantly, a Hawaii license plate in one of the student parking lots.