Lisa’s work bought several tickets to the Picnic Terrace at Petco Park as a company outing.  Luckily spouses were also invited.  It just so happened that Rob and I had planned a tailgate for that game.  We all hooked up for a tailgate and then enjoyed the game, which we won at the very end.

The picnic terrace included all you could eat snacks, food, and desserts plus a rather unique view from behind the bullpen.  We saw the entire pitching staff and Lisa was lucky enough to get a signature from Mike Adams.  As an added bonus, we got free hats!

I have had the opportunity to travel to Scottsdale to meet with a business partner on a few occasions.  Normally I have been flying out on Southwest for a day trip (out and back in the same day).  This time Lex recommended that we actually fly ourselves out there in a Cessna.  Lex is a former F-18 pilot and holds an ATP license.

We loaded up early in the morning and made our way over for the meeting.  On the decent into Scottsdale we could already feel the heat.  When we departed after our meeting it was well above 100 degrees.  Yikes.  We were quite happy when we reached our cruising altitude and in cooled off a bit.  Other than the heat the flight was pretty fun.  I got to fly the Cessna 182 RG which was my first aircraft with retractable gear.  Also neat was that the company was footing the bill for the flight.

Doug snapped a few pics of us from the back seat:

Well, its official…  I am a Padres season ticket holder.  For the first season I only got a 1/4 season pass.  We’ll see how it goes and maybe the next year I will upgrade to a half.  As a bonus to purchasing the season tickets I got three free Field Box Tickets for a game of my choice for this season.  I picked the Giants Game on the 11th of September.

As part of his welcome, I figured it would be nice to take Cameron with us to the game.  Since it was 9/11, they had special lag ceremony which I got a few pictures of.  Padres won, and we went to get a Pads Sweatshirt for my birthday.  Turns out it was Cameron’s first ever baseball game.  Pads won, we had a good time:

As a season pass holder perk, Rob got invited to go to Petco Park before the Padre’s game to go down to the field for batting practice.  We basically VIPs for the event, which was nice.  A representative took us in the Sony Home Plate Club under the stadium  and on to the field.  We saw that whole line up take batting practice and then saw some of the Giants start warming up.

Rob, as always, had brought Yoda with him.  There was a camera crew down there taping a teaser for the game intro and asked if they could barrow the Yoda for the spot.  For those who don’t know, the Yoda is somewhat of a mascot for the Padre’s Bullpen.  Rob was psyched.  After batting practice we went and posed for a quick picture and then headed up to the Proper Pub to kill some time before the game.  Yoda got feisty on the Bar and ordered a drink.  Here are some pics.

Lisa, John, Sandy, Emily, Thomas and I went down to the Reserve Golf Course to play the back 9.  It’s a very difficult but beautiful course.  None of us really played all that well, but we had a great time and really enjoyed the scenery.  As always, we captured a few good pics on the way: