What a Tour! What a great time! Pitty the football was so bad.
[Before I start let me give a big shout out to Ron (Canbymackem) and Craig (vanfan) who met me at Vancouver, two of the classiest lads I have ever met! Thanks for everything lads as well as the tours around your home towns! I’d also like to say hi to all the west coast crew who met the east coast massive who had managed to make the long haul over to the great North West]
Well, I got back to Manhattan last night around one AM last night (I was meant to arrive at midnight but due to the shortage of taxis on a Sunday night I was delayed a little) on Sunday the 24th having had a thoroughly fantastic time on location at three out of four of the pre season games…. and what a week it was.
I’d originally not planned to go, I’d been fired some weeks ago, re-hired by the same person, then quit (he he he) and found another job elsewhere. So I’d only just been able to find the money a day or so before I’d bought the plane tickets. But it all started, for me at least, in Vancouver, when I arrived at the airport on the Friday before the match. Let me tell you now that unless you’ve actually lived in New York and then visited Vancouver, you probably won’t appreciate just how clean and crisp the air is up there! It’s amazing. I walked out, saw those mountains and just breathed in… beautiful. It was so good to get away from all those buildings!
Now going back a bit, as many of you who traveled might know, a lot of us were lucky to have made it at all. There had been some serious ‘air turbulence’ (at least according to air Canada) around Toronto the days before specifically due to the hurricanes hitting the Caribbean; at all of air Canada’s flight from New York to Toronto had been cancelled for the last three days. Fortunately I had booked myself on the only plane flight that hadn’t been canceled and so made the journey in good time. Chris (PrincetonMackem) who I was traveling with was not so fortunate and only made it at midnight after his luggage had been lost and his original flight cancelled by air Canada. Amazingly no other air companies were affected by this so called air turbulence, even ones leaving at the same time from the same airport. The moral: Don’t fly air Canada.
But it was worth it. Let me tell you now, Vancouver is an amazing city with amazing bars, I stayed at the Ramada Travel Lodge near the ground, but even at this out of town location I was amazed to see how many Starbucks coffee shops and homeless people there were around. At times it seemed like that was all there was there, coffee or homeless people, although admittedly sometimes there were homeless people with coffee. This was a pattern to be followed throughout the tour, except the coffee proliferation got less the further south we went: It seems that homeless, prostitution and crime is a big thing in the mild climes of the North West, I guess you’d have to be crazy to leave your bags unattended anywhere. But there you go.
It was in the Ramada that we met up with many other mackems, including aforementioned Ron and craig, Ron being a UK born lad who has liven in Portland for many years and Craig (the shirt will be purchased soon mate) a home grown lad living in Vancouver. Both took us on a tour of the city, to multiple bars (especially the English ones) where we met a lad from Seattle who invited us to his local English pub down there. After an exhausting day visiting my families street (Robson street; everything is called Robson in Vancouver) and drinking with so many other supporters I lost count we attended the match the next day.
Now the match was appalling, however there was some real talent on display on the field after the three nil drubbing (definitely not ours), in the form of Winger the duck, Vancouvers mascot, who made it his personal mission to torment me personally in the front row- despite my personal ‘objections’ and polite ‘criticism’ of his team’. The short story about Vancouver: Sign the duck … its probably best we forget about everyone else on the field that day.
Excuses for our poor performance:
1) Its just pre season and doesn’t count
2) The Team was half way through their season and we were just starting ours
3) We were without key defenders
4) They were better then us
Chris summed it up the best afterwards: “At least the views nice” he said drly, and it was; one half of the park looked out into the thick pine forest of a national park, the other down onto the sound and the majestic white capped mountains beyond. It was worth the trip just for the view!
After the game an impromptu party at the Ramada with the visiting Sunderland fans and Local Whitecaps fans left us sorely wishing that we had a few extra days to spare in this wonderful city where coffee seemed to be the main form of currency; people couldn’t afford shirts. And where real English breakfasts were easily found.
Seattle; however was where the party was at. Due to the lack of trains between cities (only one or two a day) we took the bus to our next location for the staggering fee of twenty five dollars and said goodbye to Ron, Craig, Canada and the beautiful city of Vancouver; on our way passing through some of the most amazing scenery available on the west coast of the USA. Its here the story gets interesting.
The next few days were a whirl of alcohol and excessive drinking; Vancouver had been a polite, nice city (even the homeless apologized about asking for change) but that was Canada; now we were back in the good old US of A. Having met two nice bartending lasses in a pub near Seattles massive ground [note: All the stadiums on this tour had roves, guess that’s one thing the west coast has that the east coast doesn’t] we were invited out over the next few days several times to ‘see the sights’ of seattle and this was definitely not a Canadian town.
The first stop was a fetish nightclub, only we weren’t told that before we arrived (we should have been in our S and M [Sunderland] shirts, which is held in Seattle the Monday before every full moon. Having spent a few hours in there talking to sexy nurses, naked bartenders, devil girls and various leather clad (or rather unclad) women we found ourselves watching trapeze artist half naked lasses swing with their thighs and ankles from white fabric hanging from the roof. By this time we’d already decided that this was the city where the party was at. We also discovered the cowgirls inc bar chain (a slightly forced party bar where ladies danced on the bar top) and a rough local biker bar where hard metal was played all night.
What about the match? Well lets not talk about it, only to say that the stadium was nice. (And roofed). Before the game we’d gone to the George and Dragon pub on the outskirts to meet up with some of the other Sunderland fans to party up there. I have to say Hi to all of them as well, especially James and (I think) Alex, local sounder lads who, after I’d taught them the words, liked them so much they kept us all entertained with “When I was young” … continuously… for four hours. Some people on the free buss (it had been laid on from the George) threatened suicide. Overall The pub and the people were awesome, the food brilliant! Good craic all round, appart from the game itself and although we’d won, it was plain to see that we had a lot of work to do.
Excuses for our poor performance (although slightly better then last time by three goals)
1) Its just pre season and doesn’t count
2) The Team was half way through their season and we were just starting ours
3) We were without key defenders
4) We weren’t putting the tackles in because it was Astro-turf.
It’s also worth noting here that again Sunderland fans were not seated in an area to ourselves. This was a pattern to be repeated throughout the tour and it appears as though a lot of the locals had asked for tickets specifically for seats in the middle of our designated sections. Again the level of support was friendly, a lot of children were present, and we packed out the stadium with locals and red an white (something like 300 to four hundred sunderland fans had made the journey), and it was uneventfull even when I exposed my Sunburned Bod after the single goal; the only critics of the lads were almost always American Celtic fans (i’m used to that in the USA, celtic fans hate us with a passion in NYC) who several times threatened to attack various fans (not me) across the ground. No threats to my knwoledge were carried out and the sounders were quite nice. After the game we retired to meet the players (we’d already met and chatted with them a few times) in the official Irish bar of the tour and partied until dawn: Its amazing how many locals don’t believe you’re just a fan. “You mean you just traveled from where?”
And I was just from the east coast!!! One lad had spent 19 hours in a plane from Australia to get to Vancouver, and we’d been terrible on both games so far! What a way to go! Ironically we also got a lot of people who didn’t know what they were talking about.
“Are you a player?” They frequently asked, eyeing Ron, Chris and I.
“No” We explained. “We’re fans” (and not that fit either)
“Wow, you guys are cray-zee”
My favorite was on the way back: They should makes the goals bigger” The taxi driver had said. “Theres not enough goals in soccer” We declined to comment, feeling slightly hypocritical after our performance so far. Our hopes were for a big finish in the last game of the tour. We needed the morale boost.
However, and this was despite the hype surrounding them, three of the biggest stars around were not going to be present at the Portland game: You may have heard of them: Our Home shirt, Timber Jim, and TommyJ
To be continued…