UML at UVM

Tomorrow afternoon my step son and I are going to a hockey game. It’s my first hockey game in person since… 2016? 2018? I can’t remember. It’s my first NCAA hockey game since 2004.

I graduated from UMass Lowell. My step son currently attends the University of Vermont. Both teams are in the Hockey East conference and… well… both teams kinda suck. UVM is in 8th place (out of 11 teams) with a 3-3-1 record in conference and a 4-5-1 record overall. UML is in 10th place with a 2-6-1 record in conference and a 5-9-1 record overall.

I expect the game is going to be evenly-ish matched but also kinda crappy. I don’t care. I’m looking forward to spending an afternoon with Harry, probably trash talking each other into oblivion. I tried to get myself a UML hockey t-shirt to wear but I failed. Oh well. The Vermont fans in the building will know that they have a foreigner in their rink by me being obnoxious. I used to be a pretty obnoxious fan back in my minor league season ticket days.

It’s going to be fun.

Back Home

We’re back home. We were out for about five hours. The trip was a bit of a bust from the leaf peeping and photo taking point of view. From the perspective of Jen and me jumping in the car and road trippin’ for the hell of it, it was a total success.

We didn’t stop anywhere. As soon as we got North of Concord, NH the clouds moved in and everything looked gloomy and bad. We dipped our toes into the White Mountain region and then turned around and took the long way home.

I took exactly one photograph:

38/365
38/365

Friday Drive

Okay, so what happened with the Disney World trip? Put simple, it ended. One of us woke up feeling sick this morning. I won’t say which one, but there are only two of us here, me and my wife, so your chances of guessing correctly are pretty freakin’ good.

Anyway, one of us woke up sick and we debated what to do about it. Stay at Disney World and see if we felt better, then fly home on Sunday. What if we feel worse and we’re just completely miserable in a hotel room for three days and then go through the hellish torture that is flying while under the weather? If you’ve never been on a plane before while you are sick then you might not know how awful an experience it can be. I’ve done it. I never want to do it again.

Also, what if whatever bug we caught turns out to be Covid-19? We can’t fly knowing we have the ‘rona. I’m sure people do it every day, but I won’t be one of them. I am not putting other people at risk that way. No, I put my foot down. I made the call. We’re driving home now. We already had a rental car to get to and from the Orlando airport. Jen called the agency and changed our drop off point to Logan Airport in Boston and off we went. We stopped to pick up some Covid tests just to be sure and they were negative. We’ll probably test again before we get home, and I am willing to bet we’ll still be negative then.

Right now it’s about 9:30pm and we’re in a hotel room somewhere in the middle of South Carolina. We will wake up early in the morning and head out again. I doubt we’ll make it all the way home tomorrow, but we’ll chew up a good chunk of route 95 North and see how far we can get. We’re about 900 miles from home right now. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow, but we’ll be together and that is literally all that matters to me.