A break from the break. You might argue it was the ultimate barnstorming trip. In the offseason of 1888-89, Al Spalding, President and part-owner of the Chicago Cubs (then called the Chicago White Stockings), took the White Stockings and a team of National League All-Stars on an around-the-world tour, to promote baseball and his sporting goods company. While the two teams stopped literally all over the world1, the most famous stop was in Egypt, where the two teams played a baseball game in front of the Pyramids and by the Sphinx.
The stop in Cairo resulted in the most iconic photo of the entire trip:
Well, 131 years to the day of that game, we visited the Pyramids and the Sphinx. (Why do you think I came to Egypt?) Obviously, we didn’t stand on the Sphinx, but we did take our picture there:
And so, from Cairo2 to Chicago: Go Cubs!
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1 Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy, Monaco, France, England, and Ireland
2 The one in Egypt, not “Little Egypt.”
UPDATE (2/20/20 9:00 pm): Now that we are home, I have been able to correct the date of this post to the date we were actually there.
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