If there’s an overarching theme to this blog, it’s that love of sports makes folks do crazy things. Case in point: Why else, other than family or business obligations, would an otherwise reasonable group of people decide to leave Southern California for a weekend in mid-December and head to chilly Denver?
It has become one of my personal ambitions — for at least as long as the lack of the proper amount of disposable income prevents me from doing the see-an-entire-sports-league’s-stadiums-in-one-month type of trip that people like me romanticize — to travel somewhere at least once each fall to see an NFL game in a venue I haven’t yet been to. Entering the season, locales such as Pittsburgh, Chicago and Green Bay were very high on my list, but other factors came into play, such as when I’d have time to do it, who would be available to go with me, and which games on the NFL schedule seemed most appealing. So it came to pass that I identified the weekend before Christmas as the most ideal time to take a trip, and had settled on going to Chicago to see Bears-Seahawks, when my buddy MongerTron stepped in. I figured that he, a Bears fan through and through, would have no problem with going to Soldier Field (he’s been; I haven’t) but we were planning this trip right after Jay Cutler’s thumb injury had flushed his hopes down the toilet (turned out he couldn’t have been more right), and instead suggested we go to Denver for Broncos-Patriots. “I just want to see a good game,” he said.
In hindsight, that was pretty good foresight. We planned the excursion just as Tebow-mania was reaching its fever pitch, and by the week of the game, it was all anyone in sports could talk about. We bought our tickets on StubHub for just under $150 a piece and felt that it was pretty expensive, but then we heard a Patriots fan at the game lament that he had paid $500 for his upper deck seat and suddenly we didn’t feel so bad. Regardless, the considerable hype leading up to the game certainly made the prospect of sitting in cold, maybe even freezing temps for the game more palatable for myself, MongerTron and Mrs. Fan.
Itinerant Fan 