Just a note. I don’t publish these travel notes in real time so the adventures I am describing usually happened at least a month or two earlier. We left Florida in August and had nearly a week at home over Labor Day weekend. There was laundry to do, people to see and a few groceries to buy. Packing for the next trip was a little tricky and time consuming as you will see as this next itinerary unfolds.
We headed to Indianapolis. Basketball has always been one of my favorite sports. When I was young, I played AAU and now, there are two seasons of the year, college basketball in the winter and the WNBA in the summer. The closest team to St. Louis would be the Indiana Fever. They play at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in downtown Indianapolis.
We had tickets to see a Tuesday evening game, Fever vs. the Chicago Sky. The Fever had finished last in the league in 2022 so they have the number one draft pick, Aliyah Boston and while she has helped the team improve greatly, they were still not going to make the playoffs. The Sky was still in it and beat the Fever handily.
We had enough time on the day we arrived to walk around downtown Indianapolis and I liked what I saw. The local St. Louis station had been running a nightly news series about other Midwestern industrial cities that also face structural problems like St. Louis and had found solutions and strategies. Indianapolis was one of those cities.
We stayed at the Hampton Inn which is not only near Gainbridge but also close to where the Indianapolis Colts play, Lucas Oil Stadium. Of course, Gainbridge is not empty in the winter because the Indiana Pacers play there. The Pacers are one of 11 franchises to have never won an NBA championship. The Fever however, won three conference titles (2009, 2012, and 2015) and one WNBA championship (2012). Their glory days were the years when Tamika Catchings was playing. She retired in 2016. Her number has been retired and is hanging in the rafters.