Car trips with my wife are fun but often involve stopping at places like the Libbey Glass Factory Outlet

Last month, Terry and I drove up to Detroit to spend a little time with our son Jared. He was on an extended road trip with the Tampa Bay Rays (his employer) that included some games in the Motor City. Since we're only 3 hours from Detroit, we thought it would be fun to hop in the car one morning, meet Jared for brunch, and attend a Rays-Tigers game.

And it was fun, no doubt. Jared lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and while Terry travels down there quite frequently, we still don't get to see Jared and his fiancée Lyndsey nearly as often as we would like.

The morning after the game, we again met Jared for some brunch (actually for pastries at a bakery in the tony suburb of Birmingham, Michigan, not far from the Rays' hotel). Then Terry and I hit the road again to return home.

We made the usual lunch/bathroom stop, but before that we took a detour into Toledo, Ohio, to visit the Libbey Glass Factory Outlet. This store is situated maybe 1,000 feet from the banks of the Maumee River in what I assume is the heart of Toledo, and as you might imagine, it features a lot of glass products.

Like, a lot of glass products. Several thousand square feet of glass products and related merchandise, much of which is priced ridiculously low.

This store is – again, as you might imagine – much more Terry's jam than mine. My interest in glassware was limited to seeing if I could find a coffee mug to add to my collection (I did not) and discovering if I could successfully navigate the store with a shopping cart without breaking anything (I managed it).

Terry, on the other hand, happily walked around the Libbey Glass Factory Outlet for 45 minutes, leaving with an array of items, not all of which were made of glass.

I followed her around patiently and was actually way more engaged than I thought I would be. There was some pretty cool stuff in there, though that may simply reflect the fact that I'm entering old manhood. Thirty-year-old Scott never would have been as interested as I was.

My favorite part of the experience was being there with my wife and watching her enjoy herself. Because that's what you do when you're married: You take pleasure in your spouse's pleasure. Even if it's not your favorite activity in the world, you do it because he/she wants to do it.

And honestly, it wasn't any sort of big sacrifice. We walked around laughing and talking as we do, then we paid for the stuff Terry had picked out, carried it to our car, and took off east toward Cleveland to finish the drive home.

Do I look forward to returning to the Libbey Glass Factory Outlet any time soon? I do not.

Do I want to make my wife happy and preserve my marriage? I do.

I have to admit, though...it was fascinating to see just how wide a selection there is for anyone interested in discount glass stemware.

Sometimes it feels like your kids match their chronological age and sometimes it doesn't

Tomorrow our son Jared turns 27, which feels about right.

What I mean is that, yes, instinctively I think of Jared as someone in his later mid-20s. Or early late 20s. However you want to say it.

He's well established in his career, he has a wonderful fiancée we all love, and he's a responsible adult of the sort you expect your kid to be at this age.

Our other kids are also doing well for themselves, but with Elissa, for instance, I still can't believe she's 31. I can't believe she's 30-anything.

Maybe it's because she's the only one of our kids who has crossed that three-decade age barrier, but man, I have a hard time equating 4-year-old Elissa (who by my reckoning was part of our lives as recently as last year) with successful, mature 31-year-old Elissa.

It just doesn't seem possible.

And Chloe? Same thing. She's 28, married, and on the verge of becoming a mother. But to me she's "Little Chloe," which is how she would refer to herself when she was of preschool age. "Little Chloe, coming through!" is something she used to say that Terry and I reminisce about often.

Don't even get me started on Melanie and Jack. They're doing adult things now but simply shouldn't be. Maybe I've tried to hold onto their youth too long simply because they're our two youngest children, I don't know.

But yeah, Jared turning 27 feels about right. I've often called him "the hardest working man in sports communications" and I still think that's true. He puts in a lot of time and effort on behalf of his employer, the Tampa Bay Rays, a sure sign he has made significant progress since he was a hard-working but somewhat disorganized high school student 10 short years ago.

It's baseball season, so Jared is of course hard at work. He can't be in Ohio celebrating with us, but we'll at least grab him for a quick phone conversation tomorrow, I'm sure.

Happy 27th birthday to our oldest son and a man who fits his age.

Like any job, there are ups and downs to working in the sports industry

Terry and me with our son Jared at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida...before the place was torn up by a hurricane.

My son Jared, who works for Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Rays, put it better than I could have when he said, "Everybody wants to work in baseball until they actually work in baseball."

What he meant was that lots of people are anxious to work for a professional baseball team, but when faced with the reality of what that means day to day, it's a career choice some quickly regret.

Jared's words resonated with me because I started my career in sports media as a newspaper journalist here in Northeast Ohio. I was a sports agate clerk/staff writer for The News-Herald, a large suburban daily paper, from 1988 to 1990 while in college, spent nearly a year as a sports writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Lake-Geauga Bureau in 1991 while still in college, then returned to The News-Herald in late '91 as a full-time sports writer.

I worked for the paper until the fall of 1996, when I switched gears and began writing plan documents for a health insurance firm.

That's a big change, but it was necessitated by two key factors that still loom large for local sports journalists:

(1) Terry and I were starting to have kids, and I needed a larger salary than The News-Herald could provide. Very, very few people in sports media are anywhere near what you might call "rich."

(2) Along those same lines, I worked nights, usually until 1 or 2 in the morning. That is not conducive to a growing family, especially when the kids start playing sports or have evening school events.

The work itself was fun, but it could be tiring. There were many nights when I would cover a game, come back to the office and write my story, then start editing articles and laying out pages for the next day's paper. THEN we had to stick around until the first papers came off the presses to check that no glaring errors had made it through the editing process.

Similarly, during the baseball season, Jared's days are long no matter whether the Rays are home or away. As Senior Coordinator, Baseball Information & Communications, he researches and writes pages and pages of media notes (starting in the morning on game days). After games he's doing more writing, researching and generally helping media do their jobs well.

If you're a sports fan, you might know the Rays are playing this season at George Steinbrenner Field, a minor league baseball facility, since their home park at Tropicana Field is unplayable after being damaged last year by Hurricane Milton.

I texted Jared on the day of the Rays' home opener this season and asked him how it went.

He reported that the bullpen cameras at Steinbrenner Field had been installed incorrectly so that they couldn't tell which relief pitchers were warming up. That's information usually announced right away in the press box.

And speaking of announcing information, I don't think the press box microphones were working, either, so Jared or someone else on the Rays' staff had to yell out relevant information to the assembled media as it became available.

All of this was happening while Jared was trying to do his regular job and also training two new Rays communications staffers. It was a long, exhausting day, I'm sure, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary for people who work in professional sports.

That's just the way the job goes, and if you don't want to do it, they can always find someone who does.

I'm a big fan of the current sports staff at The News-Herald. Among those writers is a guy named Chris Lillstrung, who covers many of the "niche" sports I like to follow closely like soccer, hockey, and track and field.

I'm also Facebook friends with Chris. He often posts about the sacrifices people like him have to make in order to survive in newspaper journalism these days. It's still relatively low paying, and it still involves long evening hours that make it difficult for him to spend time with his daughter.

None of what Chris posts is whining, though. It's just fact.

I pay for a subscription to The News-Herald to read what Chris, John Kampf, Ben Hercik, Jay Kron and other N-H sports scribes write, but my few bucks aren't enough to give these professionals the type of compensation they really deserve.

The economics of the industry are such that they're simply not going to be paid large salaries, and instead they must take some solace in the fact that what they're doing is also providing a valuable community service.

That's heartening to think about, but it doesn't pay the bills.

The point is, any time you think "how cool!" when you hear about a friend's kid working in professional sports, or if you yourself are considering a career in that field, make sure you go into it with your eyes wide open.

It IS cool and personally rewarding, and it can be done, but understand what you're giving up in return.

When it comes to the sports industry, there never has been any such thing as a free lunch.

Hockey, Jared and me: Bonding over sports with your kid

That's my son Jared at his office in St. Petersburg, Florida. It's an awfully big office.

All of my children have been involved in athletics of one kind or another, but only one is what you might call a "sports fan" like me.

That would be my son Jared. Since he was very young, our main connection has been sports. I coached him in t-ball and youth soccer, and over the years we have attended baseball, basketball, hockey and football games, and have made visits together to three professional sports halls of fame.

I assume this had at least some influence on Jared's choice of profession. He works for the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team as Coordinator, Baseball Information & Communications, which means he spends a lot of time researching, writing and disseminating stats and information about the Rays to media and other stakeholders.

A lot of fathers and sons (and mothers and sons, and mothers and daughters, and fathers and daughters) connect through sports, whether it's competing or spectating or both. For us, most of the memories revolve around hockey.

For example, we're in our 17th year as season ticket holders for the Cleveland Monsters of the American Hockey League. Jared and I have probably attended more Monsters games over that time than anyone else in the family.

We have also travelled to Columbus, Pittsburgh and Buffalo to watch National Hockey League games, and we even co-own a fantasy hockey team together.

There was also a stretch during the winter of 2010 when I would take Jared to a nearby ice rink every Sunday afternoon so he could learn to skate and play hockey from a coach. While he didn't take up the sport competitively after that, I do believe it deepened his appreciation of and love for the game.

All of this is to say that, while he and I talk about a lot more than just hockey and sports in general, that's where our strongest ties have been formed. We have cheered together for various hapless Cleveland teams, mourned playoff losses, and celebrated the Cavaliers' glorious NBA title in 2016.

Next month – one month from today, as a matter of fact – I will join him in Florida as we attend an NHL game in Tampa between the host Lightning and my beloved Ottawa Senators. It was a Christmas gift from Jared and his girlfriend Lyndsey, and I think it was a perfect one.

He's a good guy, that Jared. And an excellent fantasy hockey co-owner.

Most of all, he's my best sports friend.