Saturday, September 12: The Glamour Of NFL Travel
Posted by Matt Terl on September 12, 2009 – 7:11 pm
That’s the view from my hotel room in scenic Bergen County, New Jersey. When we arrived in Jacksonville last week, it was gray and raining. When we arrived in Newark today, it was gray and raining. I can only hope that this is a trend that holds up throughout the season.
Anyhow, here — for those of you who may be curious — is a rough itinerary for how a travel day like today shakes out.
The players start their morning at 8:00 with a couple hours of meetings, followed by the not-a-walkthrough mock game. Then they’ve got 45 minutes to get any treatment they need, get cleaned up, and get dressed for travel. (That’s about two hours of sitting for the players.)
The buses left Redskins Park promptly at 11:15 — seen off down a balloon-lined Redskins Park Drive by members of Extremeskins accompanied by Albert Haynesworth’s grandmother and son.
We followed a police escort on a circuitous route through D.C. to avoid protesters and triathlon traffic and arrived at Union Station just after noon. (Call it another hour of sitting.) From there it was down the escalators and onto the chartered train, which actually rolled out just ahead of it’s 12:15 scheduled departure.
Then we sat on the train for about two and a half hours, until we arrived in Newark, New Jersey, where we boarded more buses for the ride to the hotel. Call that about another half hour of sitting, which means that on a travel day like today, there’s around six hours where the players do little more than sit. And that’s not ever factoring in the meetings that some position groups have this evening in the hotel.
All of which is just a long and roundabout way of whetting your appetites for the fact that — like I did last year — I gave a video camera to Casey Rabach for the trip, and hopefully he’ll capture just a hint of the awesomeness that I’m describing here. We’ll see early next week.
Tomorrow, finally, the season begins.
Tags: redskins @ giants, Redskins@Giants, travel, washington redskins, WashingtonRedskins
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