Trip Update

We officially hit that point in Spring Training about a week ago when there's nothing else to talk about until Opening Day (this Monday!), so I will take this opportunity now to briefly keep any eager readers aprised of what's been going on with the actual trip since we planned it about a month ago.

The first thing we did, obviously, was get this blog set up. Erik consulted a friend and got it up and running pretty quickly, and we try to post on it as often as possible. Erik has also created a logo for our trip, which I'm not going to post on the website yet until we are "officially" affiliated with Habitat for Humanity. That lead me into another thing -- Erik has FINALLY contacted Habitat about what we were doing. This will hopefully allow us to obtain free tickets/hotels, and maybe even sponsors for the trip. We plan on printing up shirts with the logo on the front and some of our sponsors on the back if we have any, which we'll wear while collecting donations.

On my end of things, I've been contacting teams, hotels, and sponsors since last summer. Most of them don't want anything to do with us since we aren't using Habitat letterhead in the letters, and therefore they think we're trying to scam people. This was why Erik and I felt that it was best to alert Habitat of our mission so we don't get arrested. Once we get the go-ahead, we'll go ahead and re-mail all the teams and hotels and go from there, in an effort to obtain free seats and/or permission to conduct raffles and donation tables outside the stadium(s).

Some teams have cooperated already through my first round of emails though, and I should mention them. We have received free tickets from the Diamondbacks and a hotel in San Francisco has offered us a complimentary room. I am in correspondence currently with the Mets and Nationals and I hope to close those deals soon. The tricky part will be getting permission to conduct our donation areas; most letters we got back from teams were something to the effect of "Awesome trip, great idea, we support this charity...unfortunately we cant give you seats and we cant help with your raffle/donation table." Hopefully things will go a bit more smoothly in the coming months, but I have no doubt in my mind that it will. Worst comes to worst, we'll just solicit people while tailgating.

That's it for now...first game this Sunday night!