After the thunderstorm affected game in Nashville we continued to drive north, staying for a couple of nights in Salem, Virginia before getting up to Chester, Pennsylvania the night before catching the boat from New York back to Southampton.
I don’t imagine Chester is on many tour itineraries but we were there for the Philadelphia Union game. If I’d had a bit more time I’d probably have had a look at the Rocky statute, although I doubt I’d have ran up the steps to it. As it was, we checked into our hotel in the rain and when it cleared drove down to the Talen Energy Stadium.
It was thirty dollars to park the car and that wasn’t even at the stadium, just some gravel wasteland a couple of hundred yards away. Despite the threat of rain there was some tailgating going on, tailgating in the American sense that is of eating and drinking in the car park, rather than the English meaning of just driving too closely behind someone else.
We didn’t bother. As I was driving I couldn’t drink and so milling around next to my hire car didn’t seem all that attractive a proposition. Instead we headed around to the stadium, picked up our tickets from the collection point and, after a cursory bag search, made our way inside.
I’d booked our tickets a few weeks earlier for fifty five dollars a pop with the booking fees. We had seats down the side, but towards the end. One noticeable aspect was the width of the seat. They were much wider than those at the Boro, where I’m generally squeezed up against the fans either side of me.
The width of the seats might have had some correlation to the availability of stuff to eat in the concourse. It was more like a food court than a football ground. I had something called a Goop Dog which was a hot dog sat on a bed of bacon and onions and topped with a layer of cheesy sauce. With a coke it came to fifteen dollars and so it’s easy to see why people may prefer to eat their own snacks in the car park.
Back in our seats there wasn’t much going on. I’d checked the line-ups and Orlando had the ex-Man United player, Nani, on the bench, whilst Union had the dodgy Jamaican keeper that I’d seen three days earlier starting for them. I didn’t see either of them though as the players weren’t bothering to warm up. Perhaps they had done it earlier.
As the stadium clock reached the scheduled start time of seven o’clock there was still no sign of the players. What we got instead was a severe weather warning announcement asking everyone to leave their seats and take refuge in the concourse. About half of the two -thirds full stadium took notice and headed indoors. Some took advantage of the empty seats to move under cover, whilst others, ourselves included, just stayed where we were.
After the game in Nashville I felt I was a veteran of these situations and judged the darkening skies to be more inclement than severe. Besides, I’ve stood in the pouring rain watching the Boro at Oldham in the past and at the end of the game gone home with a waterlogged sheepskin coat that weighed more than I did. That’s severe.
We sat in our seats for the next hour and a quarter watching the lightning in the distance. At no point did it seem anything like as near as it had been at the Nashville game. A fella in front of us had some sort of storm tracking app on his phone that he was scrutinising as if he were a Formula One engineer deciding when to pull his driver in for new tyres.
At a quarter past eight the game was called off. I’d already checked the terms and conditions on the back of my ticket which stated that no refund would be given if the game were to be rescheduled sometime within the next year.
It was later announced that the game would be rescheduled for 4.30pm the following day, exactly one hour after we were due to board the boat to England. Great, that’s a hundred and ten dollars down the Swanee. We made it back to the car before the rain started and then were stuck in our thirty dollar car park for an hour whilst the traffic cleared.
It was a disappointing end to what had been an excellent few weeks in the States. We’d driven the Blue Ridge Highway, watched three baseball games and a football match, hiked in the Smokies and on the Appalachian Trail, startled a bear at close range, tracked a snake and boiled eighty pounds of crawfish in an oil drum. I can put up with a postponed game after that lot.
Trail of the Lion King 