I love a good road trip. And a road trip so Roy can watch the Vikings play in their brand-new stadium? Why not? It would be fun!
Our road trip required that we get to the Minneapolis area the night before, so we’d have plenty of time at the stadium. So, we got pretty much the last motel room in Chaska on the outskirts of the city. We got our key and checked out our room…and sat down on the bed…and lifted the covers to check out the slab of marble that had to be what it was made of, it was so hard.
A quick visit with the desk clerk wasn’t helpful:
Me: Could we get a room with a mattress and a box springs instead of two box springs?
Clerk: Are you trying to infer that the bed is hard?
Me: No, I’m saying right out that this bed is so hard, Goldilocks would have sued for back injuries!
Clerk: If you are dissatisfied, you are welcome to vacate the room.
Of course, he knew that every hotel in the area (including his by that time) was sporting a no vacancy sign. There was no help for it…we had no choice but to stay with a bed that had all the comfort of a metal table in a morgue. About five o’clock a.m., after tossing and turning for a while, I finally decided to sit up in the overstuffed chair in the room. It was apparently overbalanced as well, and I immediately went over backwards in the chair, hitting my head on the wall with the required swear words along with it. Roy sat straight up in the bed, hollering, “What the …..” He wasn’t too upset however, or he was just too asleep to react, because while I struggled to get out of the overturned chair, he fell back asleep!
I left the hotel, bent over from a serious “bed-back,” and headed out to the game, fortified with a great breakfast consisting of a banana! We got to downtown Minneapolis and then searched for a place to park. The closer the parking space was to the stadium, the more it cost, so we finally found a parking lot charging only $15, compared to $25 or $30 by those with geographic advantage. Our lower price parking was offset by the fact that we walked for half an hour to get to the stadium.
But what a stadium! It was amazing with the huge doors standing wide and music playing and souvenirs being hawked. As we headed inside, I was thrilled to see that at 9:30 a.m., the hawkers were standing in the entrances to the stadium trying their best to sell the people coming in some beer. Even more disturbing is that they were succeeding.
Now I don’t mind if a person wants to enjoy a beer, but at 9:30 in the morning? Really? And of course, the person who was buying and consuming the most ended up right behind me…as usual. He courted disaster by taunting fans from the other team with comments about their looks and actions. He screamed so loud in my ears that I am still not hearing entirely right, but I know I’ll hear him yelling, “Come on, ref, throw a “f……” flag once willya?”
He was pretty well greased when he got to his seat, but he continued to buy beers from the vendors coming around. They came around with beer three times as often as any other (non-intoxicating) refreshment. I know the beer was cold because what he missed guzzling down, he spilled on my arms and neck and spit on me as he was screaming at the game. After he left permanently in the fourth quarter, I discovered that my coat pocket (with my camera in it) had been soaked at some point with beer as well, no doubt courtesy of my inebriated friend.
It really was a very nice road trip, and a great game in spite of hard beds and too much beer. Fortunately, my camera survived its alcoholic sponge bath, but I have to ask the venders at US Bank Stadium if maybe, in the future they could sell hotdogs, soda and water and maybe some peanuts and just lose the beer?
© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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