Brandon and Katie Go To a Football Game

So last weekend this guy and his girl who've been married almost three years and who sometimes feel like they’ve been growing up too fast and who got tired of being all super tight with money decided for a weekend to just say "Screw it" and go on an adventure. 

* * * 

It starts Friday afternoon.

Katie and I just want something fun to do over the weekend. We’ve been talking a lot lately about, very simply, making life better.

This is not easy. Greenville is a quaint little eastern North Carolina town. Quaint for experiential type young adults like us often means boring. We’ve tried to find decent live music. We’ve gone to movies. We go out to eat. We go to bars with friends. We’ve considered robbing banks for sport. It’s all lovely. But sometimes it gets boring. This weekend, I can’t find any good music, she isn’t feeling any of the new movies, and we’re not in a go-to-the-bar-with-people mood, and we can’t decide on costumes for bank robberies, so we’re just all like, “Blah.”

Then Katie says, “Can we go to the NFL games tomorrow?”

I say, in that rare moment when I know the right thing to say to my wife, “Yes, let’s do that.”

We’d been talking about it. Neither of us have been to an NFL game before. We talked about going to Charlotte to see the Panthers play sometime this year and never did. Maybe next year, we said.

We had plans to watch football all day on Saturday. Saints at 4. Broncos-Patriots at 8. We were pretty stoked about it. We both love football.

Then, possibly still high on the madness that was the weekend before’s Denver Broncos/Tim Tebow Playing Like A Real Quarterback insane awesomeness, Katie says, “I mean, New England isn’t really that far? Right?”

I say, “If we start driving tonight we can get there just in time for the game.”

“Well the game is at 8,” Katie says. “We could fly out tomorrow morning.”

We talk some more. She finds prices of flights. I find prices of tickets. Eh, flights are this much. Not that bad. Eh, tickets are $117 for the crappy seats, I say.

“Let’s pay for the good seats,” she says. “What can you get for like—“ And I’m redacting this number because we’re weirdly private about our finances.

Anyway. I find insanely good seats for aforementioned redacted dollar amount. As in, four rows from the field on the 45-yard-line behind the Broncos bench insanely good.

We talk some more. We talk about how effing cold it will be. About the flight departure times and arrival times. We even find time to hang out in Boston on Sunday before the flight home.

This whole time we’re both sort of thinking, “Yeah, we won’t really do this, but it’s probably good to get an idea for when we actually plan a trip out in advance like responsible adults.”

“Are we really going to do this?” Katie finally says. “Are we effing crazy?”

“Yeah,” I reply, “but I think it’s the good kind of crazy.”

We talk some more. Look hotels. Look at the distance from airport to the stadium and possible hotels in between.

“Mannnnnn,” Katie says. “It’d be fun.”

“Well,” I say, “we can do that. Or we can just go out to eat and go see this random experimental saxophone rock band at Tipsy Teapot tonight. They look weird.”

We talk some more.

“How good are the seats you could get?” she asks.

“Basically the 50-yard line,” I say. “Four rows back. You’ll be right behind Tim Tebow. You’ll be able to go tackle him before security catches you if you want.”

We look at the weather again.

“Nine degrees,” she says. “I don’t think I could handle that.”

“I have faith!” I say. “Fifty yard line! Tebow! Tom Brady!”

“Tebow will probably suck,” she says.

“Probably!”

“Dude, I’m torn. I feel like it’d be this awesome crazy adventure.”

“If you want to blow [redacted $$$$] on it, then hells yeah, let’s go.”

“Do you want to blow [redacted $$$$]?”

“Dude, I don’t care,” I say. “It’s either that, or spend the night in lame Greenville doing semi-lame stuff like going out to dinner and watching football on the couch and eating crap food. Or we could eat crap food in Massachusetts on a freaking adventure. Of course I don’t know if I want to blow [redacted $$$$]. But I know it’d be fun.”

Finally she’s like, “OK, seriously, what do you think?” and I’m all like, “F— it, dude, let’s go.”

“Seriously?" she says, all giddy and cute. "I’m booking the flight!?”

“Book the flight!” 

* * * 

Well first, Katie calls her parents to see if they’d mind keeping the dogs. They do not. She asks if we're crazy, ridiculous, irresponsible. They just get all excited and happy for us.

Katie books the flights. We'll leave Raleigh at 11:10 a.m., land in Boston at 3 p.m.  

I order the tickets. Section 131, behind the Broncos bench. Row 4. Seats 9 and 10.

I book the hotel. Homewood Suites in Canton, 30 minutes from Boston, 20 minutes from Foxborough/Gillette Stadium.  

She books the rental car. She also finds a coupon for a free upgrade. Score. 

We go to Katie’s parents to eat dinner and pick up her long johns. We went to Kohl’s to buy me a set of long johns. Got them on sale for sixty percent off. 

At home, we lay out one set of clothes for the game and one set of clothes for travel. We each cram our game outfit into a backpack. We put two blankets in a small duffel bag.

“Dude, we’re seriously doing this,” we say. We can’t believe it.

We go to bed around 11 p.m. We wake up around 6:30. We get to her parents to drop off the dogs around 7:30. We pick up Chik-Fil-A breakfast. We get to the airport  at 9:30, about 45 minutes earlier than we planned. Bam.

I text my family. They freak out. My dad calls, “What the heck are you doing?” But he sounds happy. They all sound happy. They all also want to know how much freaking money we’re spending. “More than $100, less than $1,000,” I say.

On the tickets, anyway.

Flight leaves on time. We get to Charlotte with about an hour before our next flight. In Charlotte you can end up a good 30 minute walk from your next gate. It takes us maybe 10 minutes. Sweet.

We stopped by Sbarro. Katie’s been craving calzones. They don’t have calzones, but they have Stromboli, so she gets that and I get pepperoni pizza and we share. We both get sodas. It’s all quite amazingly greasy and unhealthy and also delicious, like basically every ounce of the way too much airport food that will be consumed this trip. I'll later wish I’d packed my Tums.

“Are we really doing this?” we ask each other. 

* * * 

All goes unbelievably smoothly. We land in Boston on time. Along the way, people ask us where we’re going. The Patriots game, we say. They say oh, are you from Boston? No. Oh, Denver? No. Where then? North Carolina. What? Yeah, just decided to come up for the game. They are amazed. Most are nice. Only two think we’re idiots. One had a mustache and seemed like an a-hole. He read out of the bottom of his eyes and literally had his nose turned up the whole time. He also said he didn’t like football but then went on for five whole minutes about all things Tim Tebow. The other was this lady who was with him we’re pretty sure he was having an affair with. She said all nasally and indignant, “WHATS A TEBOW?” We didn’t talk to them much more.

The rest seem genuinely excited. It is, dare I say, cute.

We get out of the terminal and don’t know which shuttle to catch to the rental car office and then this huge bus stops right in the middle of the freaking street and it has “ENTERPRISE RENT-A-CAR” all over the side and we’re like, well, there we go!

The rental car guy is super nice. We get a silver Impala, 2011 edition, free upgrade from a Corolla or something small and dainty like that. He says just bring the tank back how it is now. He says it’s marked as full. I say it’s a little less than full, it’s about three-quarters, is that fine? He says you know what, don’t sweat it, I’m marking it half full.

Free gas, for the win.

We get to the hotel no problem. It’s brand-new. We’re definitely the first people to ever use our room. Which is actually a suite. Which is unbelievable. We have a king-sized bed and the hugest shower ever. It is amazing later.

We bundle up. Long johns. Thermal shirt. Jeans. Another thermal shirt. Two pairs of socks. Scarf. One jacket. Another jacket. Knit hat. Gloves. Good to go.

Off to Foxboro. We get there around 5. Cram our way into a killer parking lot. We get tips on how to get out from the locals. Boston people are super nice.

“There’s no way this trip goes any better if we plan it three months in advance,” we say.

It’s only like a half-mile walk to the stadium. We decide not to eat in one of the Patriots Place shopping center restaurants because they’re all packed and we don’t want to wait forever and risk missing any of the game. So we go on into the stadium. Find our seats. They’re absurdly awesome. We feel like a rich famous couple for having them. We gawk and take pictures. We get food. It’s ridiculously overpriced and crappy for the price and it’s delicious because DUDE WE’RE IN GILLETTE FREAKING STADIUM TO WATCH TIM TEBOW AND THE BRONCOS AND TOM BRADY AND THE PATRIOS AND AHHHHHHH I’M TOTALLY FREAKING OUT!

Yeah. And also, it's freezing. The coldest cold you’ve ever felt in your life, especially if you’re a Southerner from North Carolina who is secretly a total wimp. 

I’m also thinking, man, these players really need to know what their fans go through to see them live and in person. It’s ridiculous. We sat in traffic for an hour. We are freezing our asses off. We’re paying extortionary prices for food and drink. We are cramming in here among 65,000 others. We are making you millionaires. Thank us.

Over and over we look at each other and say things like, “This is crazy. This is awesome. This is crazy awesome.”

I keep thinking how beautiful Katie looks all bundled up and shivering.

Watching Tim Tebow in person is nothing like watching him on TV. He is so much uglier a thrower and so much more intense a football player. He is a leader and a half.

Same goes for Tom Brady, only he is so much smoother and calm and simply fantastic in person. Screw the stupid UGG boots ads. Screw the hair plug rumors and screw the pretty boy image he’s manicured. Remember where he came from, a nobody backup to a legend who became a legend himself and even greater.

The game is awful. We expected as much. We love Tebow, but we sort of agreed with most of American adults who believed he and his Broncos would be handily destroyed. When people ask us who we’re cheering for, we just say Good Football. The game is also awesome. We decide this was good, or else the angry Boston fans would be tough to deal with. Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos look terrible all night. This makes Katie make sad faces at me, but even she can’t fake that for long because THIS IS AWESOME.

Tom Brady sets records. We’ve never seen a man who makes throwing touchdown passes look so easy. We’ve also never seen a man in person so impossible to stop as Patriots TE Ron Gronkowski. One Denver safety got hurt twice tackling him. Denver CB Champ Bailey shied away from him in the open field. We’ve never seen football players scared to hit somebody, but Ron Gronkowski scares them. You don’t see that on television.

We see Denver fans wearing Tebow jerseys get drunk, which we think contradictory and hilarious.

We see Jesus. Or a guy dressed like him, anyway. He wears robes and a beard and carries a sign that said “Trust in Me. Bet on Patriots.” He also holds a Budweiser bottle.

We hear the tens of thousands mockingly chant “Teeee-BOW, Teeee-BOW” throughout the second half as it became clear Tebow Time would not happen tonight. We see the best and the worst of fandom. We see Tom Brady on a third down freaking punt a football. We think the game moves so much quicker in real life than watching on television. We take as many pictures as we can, which isn’t as many as we originally planned because we have to take our gloves off to take the pictures and it’s too freaking cold for that and by the end of the game when we ask someone else to take a picture of us standing together she still looks amazing but I look like a blah dummy because my face is too frozen to even smile right.

We feel like kids. 

* * * 

We wake earlier Sunday morning than we meant to, around 8:30 a.m. We’d set our alarms for 9:30, in time to get some free breakfast. We’d gotten back to the hotel around 12:30 and immediately passed out.

We shower. We eat breakfast. We pack up and print out our boarding passes and check out. Since our flight doesn’t leave until 5 that afternoon, we spend the day exploring Boston. We go to lunch in Quincy at the Union Street Oyster House. I’d eaten there once before, recommended it by a friend and Boston native who says it’s the best New England clam chowdah in Boston.

We shop in the Quincy Market. We buy some sweet t-shirts that were, impossibly, all at once patriotic and stylish.

And I swear, it’s colder now than the night before. We’d planned to walk more, but in 10 degree weather, you stay in the car.

We drive around. We go over to Charlestown because that’s where Ben Affleck filmed parts of his movie The Town, which we both love. We stumble across Bunker Hill, as in the Battle Of. We climb 294 steps up up the memorial and catch a rad view of the city, although the size of the window and the grime on it and the angle of light make getting pictures quite the challenge. I have a moment where I think about how climbing those steps together, most of them hand-in-hand (except for the narrow parts where strangers had to squeeze by) is all fitting and meptahorical and sweet and junk and then I think no way can I write that cheese on my blog, it’s sharper than that cheddar cheese I’m surprised I like, and, well, now, there it is. But it was.

We talk a lot. We talk about our marriage and we talk about our future. We hold hands and we kiss and we make silly jokes and we remember past wrongs and apologize and forgive each other for them fresh all over and I’m pretty sure we fall in love again.

We return the car at 2:45ish, still in awe at how impossibly well the whole trip has gone. Even a last-minute hiccup smooths out. The guy who checks the car back in initially charges us $119 total, saying we should’ve refilled it to full. I tell him about the first guy, and he asks who it was, and I say I don't know. I’m like, Ah, well, not everything could go perfect, but 50 extra bucks at this point is nothing.

Then the guy says, Ah, don’t sweat it, and he just charges us the original $64. Unbelievable.

* * *

I sleep a lot on the flights home. Boston to D.C. to Raleigh. When I’m awake, Katie and I look at each other a lot and laugh a lot and say a lot, “Dude, we were in BOSTON this morning.” I laugh hard because I’d turned down a two-hour trip to Topsail Island with a friend because Katie’d had work on Monday and I was busy with stuff … and then we up and decide to go to Boston.

We feel so full. Not of food. Actually, well, yes, of food. But also, just, full. We feel like we’ve been gone for a week. We feel the best kind of tired.

“We’ve lived,” Katie says.

On the drive home we talk a lot more about marriage and life and dreams and plans and pasts and futures. We say we’re going to do more trips like this. We talk about Europe and cruises and Australia and New Zealand and Ireland. We talk about building things for hurting people in Africa. We talk about helping people in trouble here at home. We say this trip spoiled us because it went too perfectly, but it’s awesome because now we’re always going to want to go on trips because this one went so well.

We pick up the dogs and recap the trip with her parents and then we go home and fall exhausted into bed. The next morning we’re talking about it all and looking at our bank account and shaking our heads and laughing and laughing.

“We were in Boston yesterday.”

And then we look at each other and we say, “So, what are we doing next?”