Kansas City

Ok, so I know that I kind of left the New York travelogue hanging, and believe me, there's more. For example, I never explained the case of the Mystery Liquid, which happened to me while in the City. It's such a mystery, I've considered having Poirot himself investigate it. I also never explained how I got Ryan and myself into a Jay-Z music video. But anyone that cares enough can ask me and I will explain it fully and thoroughly.

Onward and Upward, however, is what I always say. I've taken trips since then. Here's a brief write-up of a recent one.

There are generally competitions involving the National Team during summers. Last summer, we had the World Cup. This summer, we have the Gold Cup. It is basically the championship for North America, Central America and the Caribbean Islands. The tournament consists of a round robin phase followed by a knockout phase, very similar to the World Cup.

Tim and I decided to travel to Kansas City to watch the final of the three group stage games against Guadaloupe. Where is Guadaloupe, you might ask? Excellent question! It's in a little cluster of islands north of Venezuela. It's a French colony. They are a tiny nation, but have caused problems for teams in the Gold Cup before. We both figured it would be a fun game, we got fairly cheap airfare, so we decided to have a go.

We arrived at the airport around the same time, on different flights. After meeting up perfectly at the rental car facility, we got our car and took off for the stadium. The stadium was brand new, and I mean BRAND NEW. It had been open for a few weeks and only one game had been played there. We showed up to the stadium a few hours early, parked (for free!!), and set off on our adventure.

A new trend in stadiums is to build them near little shopping centers, or better yet, to build new shopping centers along with the stadiums. Local politicians are always more likely to vote for something that is going to "generate economic activity" and these little malls are used to say "Hey, you taxpayers should fund this stadium because....look at all the money traffic will generate at these malls!!" This stadium was built near an existing mall and we went and had a 5 guys burger and headed into the stadium.

This stadium was VERY nice. State of the art. I've included some pictures below.



My favorite part, however, was the "supporters club." There is a section of the stadium for the loyal supporters, and there is access to an inside, air conditioned, sports bar, complete with tvs and cheap liquor (from what I gathered). More on this later, but here's a picture of me and Tim with some steward in the supporters club. She jumped in the picture right as someone else took it.


We made our way to our seats to catch the first half of our doubleheader, Canada vs. Panama. We beat almost everyone else there, and grabbed the seats we wanted in the general admission area. They were right behind a goal post, as you'll see later. The first game was pretty boring, until Panama scored right at the end to tie it. This meant that the USA needed a draw to move into the next round.

The US game started, and the supporters section got warmed up. Chants of "I Believe that we will Win!" and other such chants began. Very energetic, and good crowd. The USA dominated play, but only managed to get one goal for all their efforts. Jozy Altidore hit an absolute screamer in about the 10 minute and that was all the scoring we needed. 1-0, USA.

Here is a video taken from by me of Clint Dempsey taking a free kick. Not bad.



After the US won, we were in no hurry to go fight traffic, so we mulled around the stadium, when we heard noise coming from the supporters club. We walked in and saw a hundred or so people gathering and chanting. We wandered over, and decided to join in. Here's a noisy and shaky video I took while in the group.



It was a lot of fun in there, and we finally got hot enough and tired enough to head back to the car and drive to the airport. Here's where I'll cut off for now and finish up tomorrow.