All the time we have been in Michigan and Illinois there has been huge excitement about the Baseball World Series – which we have seen has made the news at home.  It is has been great to see it at first hand.  We first noticed these white flags with a blue ‘W’ flying on our first weekend in Chicago.  This flag is flown from buildings and cars and balconies when the Cubs win and that first weekend they were playing the Dodgers to get the opportunity to compete in the World Series against the Cleveland Indians.

By the time we got to Barbara and Marty’s things had heated up for the Cubs and they had made the playoff finals, for the title which is the best of seven games.   The Chicago Cubs had not won the World Series since 1908 so shades of Leicester all over again.  The Indians had not won since 1948 – so they were the Spurs of last season…

Marty was amazingly patient explaining the game to us and I must say we really enjoyed watching it.  I am nervous now writing this as I am bound to drop a clanger in – like ‘in bat’ not ‘at ball’ and he will read it and roll his eyes!! He was very good and made us read the score back to him at intervals during the match and we watched so much of it as the Series went to the last game that we even got to know some of the players’ names and quirks.  We now cannot wait to see our first live match.

Every bar and restaurant has sport on so you might as well get with the programme as they would say here.  Anyway, we finally saw the Cubs win in the parking lot on our last night in St Joseph at about 12.30am. We had left Barbara and Marty half an hour before as just to add to the drama there was a rain delay… just like British sport the tension was ratchetted up another notch.

Next day as we drove south through Illinois wherever we stopped people were talking about the game as no one could have gone to sleep before 1am, or wearing the shirts or flying the flag.  Hillary and Donald got in on the act too as you will have seen – as at least baseball seems to unite people here!

I think the funniest thing yesterday was went to the Abraham Lincoln museum and even he had a speech bubble above the door saying Go Cubs!!

A