Excellent Adventure Day # 59
A Royal Welcome
Somewhere in this area, and it might very well have been Prince William, things began to change on Bill & Sue’s Excellent Adventure. Most of the changes were for the good. In the weeks that followed, an old high school friend of mine who worked in marketing for Foot Locker got in touch with my mom and said he might be able to help sponsor our tour….without that help we had planned to hang up the car keys as we approached our home base in New England.
That night in Woodbridge, VA, on the metal bleachers of the Prince William Cannons, we got interviewed for a second time by USA Today Baseball Weekly and that story built on what was already becoming some pretty significant national publicity coming from the ESPN segments. We were also being interviewed by local media at just about every stop.
We still had a month or so of parks in the southeast before getting into the relatively easy daily trips in the northeast, but I think it was that weekend – the closest we had been to home in two months, that I felt, really for the first time, that we were likely to be able to finish what we had started.
Prince William’s stadium was, at the time, known simply as Prince William County Stadium. It later became G. Richard Pfitzner Stadium and, still later, Northwest Federal Field at Pfitzner Stadium but throughout it’s history hosting the franchise, which ended last year, it looked largely the same.
The Trip
The Video
There’s a little of everything in this video: a bird’s nest in the Durham Bulls dugout, a mascot who looks a lot like the guy who stole Frosty’s Cape, a good game on the field and new friends in the stands.
Baseball Today
The Cannons changed their name from the Prince William Cannons to the Potomac Cannons in 1999 and then, when the Montreal Expos relocated to Washington they became the Potomac Nationals in 2004 and remained playing in Pfitzner Stadium until the end of last season.
This season, however, the team was due to begin playing in a new ballpark in Fredericksburg, about 30 miles south on Interstate 95 and be renamed the Fredericksburg Nationals.
On Deck
Coming up tomorrow morning, I’ll have an interview on the Low Mileage Tour on 435 Voices podcast with Kevin Heilbronner who was the radio voice of the Prince William Cannons for four years. Kevin began that job in 1991 and we talk about Prince William County Stadium and life as a minor league broadcaster.
Later in the day we continue in the Carolina League and head north again, through Washington DC to Frederick, MD where on a warm Friday evening, June, 7, 1991, we saw the Frederick Keys host the Durham Bulls in a doubleheader.