Sporting road trip

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After Jamie and I said our goodbyes I headed to the mile high city, Denver, Colorado. This would begin the next phase of my trip involving a lot of sporting events. I spent a few days here checking out the city and getting my first taste of NBA basketball action on this trip, with my team the Detroit Pistons taking on the home town Denver Nuggets. It was an entertaining game but unfortunately the Nuggets won (a trend I would soon find out).

Next stop was Oklahoma City, where I’d get to see another game with the Pistons battling the OKC Thunder. My cab driver was a nice young lady who had moved to OKC from Florida. Although she had moved here herself, she wondered what possible purpose I could have for coming to OKC. One gets the feeling that there isn’t much going on out here. Still, I found it very welcoming and it has a nice bar/restaurant area called Bricktown. This is also cattle country and the steaks are fresh off the truck.

They also have an enthusiastic basketball fan base. Considering the lack of entertainment options I’d definitely have season tickets if I lived here. The Pistons played well, but it was not enough against one of the best teams in the league. Earlier that day I visited the Oklahoma Bombing memorial building, the site of the 1995 bombing carried out by misguided crackpot Timothy McVeigh. It is a sobering, but very good memorial with lots of information and well worth a visit if you become lost and end up in OKC.

Next up I flew down to Houston for a few days. It was good to be back in Texas, one of my favourite parts of the States. It didn’t take long for me to get stuck into the barbeque menu's. I saw another Pistons game, this time against the Houston Rockets. It was yet another Pistons defeat, leaving me 0-3 for the trip. I also took a trip out to the Johnson Space Center, home of the NASA space program. There was plenty to see including the Training facility, Mission Control, rockets and tourists.

From here I made a rather long detour over to the east coast of the US and the city of Pittsburgh. This would be my only stop on the east coast this trip as I’d spent a lot of time there last time. Plus it was starting to get really cold. Sandy had struck only a week or so beforehand, but Pittsburgh was far enough west to not be too affected. My reason for being here was to see an NFL football game, with my team the Pittsburgh Steelers playing. The weather was freezing - below zero, and it was raining before and at the start of the game. There were even a few spots of ice falling from the sky (not the fluffy-snow variety either). That wasn’t very enjoyable, but it stopped after a while and I could enjoy the game. The Steelers didn’t play great, but did enough to win in Overtime. At least one of my teams won in my presence!

I met a couple of fellow Steelers fans from Cleveland at the hotel and they gave me a ride to the game. This turned out to be fortuitous as traffic was terrible and cabs weren’t going out to where we were staying 10km out of town. I got to experience what it was like to hang out before and after a game at the local bars with fans all of the same team. This is something you don’t really get in Australia as Melbourne shares 10 AFL teams and there is always a mixture of fans from both teams.

After my whirlwind trip to the east, I would be getting back to Texas, just in time for the inaugural Formula 1 grand prix in Austin. More on that next time.

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Photos

Kevin Durant
Pistons v Thunder, Oklahoma City

Mission Control
Johnson Space Center, Houston

The inside of a space station
Johnson Space Center, Houston

Heinz Field
Home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Pittsburgh