Category Archives: Travel

Soccer, Travel

Kendal Town 3 – Market Drayton Town 2

So, as I type this, my trip to England is coming to a close, but it isn’t quite over yet. I still have a trip down to London tomorrow and Monday (the 4th) the flight back to Detroit. I think back on the last week and a half and I’m exhausted. I wouldn’t’ve done it any different, but it is amazing that I was able to pull it off. Newcastle, Glasgow, Kendal; all absolutely lovely places and I would go back in a heartbeat, especially to just explore or enjoy the countryside or history a little bit more.

It’s been a while since I’ve written, so I’ll back up a bit. On the 28th, I jumped in a train or three and headed from Newcastle, on the east side of the island to Kendal, in the west.

I say good bye to Newcastle central and then headed out on a journey that involved three trains, delays, someone trespassing on the tracks, nearly boarding the wrong train, nearly waiting for the wrong train, then finally getting to the right train. Waiting for 30 minutes in the cold for the last train… which I road for 5 minutes.

But I was in Kendal and I set about exploring the city and the surrounding countryside. I had trouble capturing the whole city from above, but I did what I could by climbing up a tall hill overlooking the city, where the castle is, and doing my best.

The second picture is actually of my hotel from the castle tower. The castle and hill were beautiful, but then I went about exploring the town proper the next day, and found it to be much larger than I expected and much more bustling. 30,000 plus live in the area, much more than I thought.

Most of the city is made of this grey stone, giving Kendal it’s nickname, the Auld Grey Town. But many buildings are rather colorful, like these ones here.

It’s also a town of alleyways and yards in the middle of blocks of buildings. Down one of these alleyways was a little distillery, which of course I popped my head into.

And the city had some old-fashioned public or free houses, including the highly recommended and eclectic Ring O’ Bells, where, if you’re lucky, you get to meet Kendal’s biggest character: Jeff from Swindon.

And yes.

I met Jeff from Swindon/

The next day, today as of writing, was my final match of the trip: Kendal Town FC vs Market Drayton Town FC. Kendal Town is in a bit of a bind. Manager walked with the first team after issues getting paid by the club came to light. There’s a fissure between fans who want the chairman to step down and those that either don’t care or don’t blame him for the issues facing the club. As of writing the current manager might be the one paying the players, and from what I could gather, he wasn’t a manager so much as a wealthy gentleman who fancied himself one. Kendal Town is in the relegation fight, and a relegation at this level of football is basically into obscurity. Every game is vital. Every point is needed.

Luckily, I’m three for three when rooting for the homeside.

This pitch is a bit different from the previous two: tucked away in the hills behind the castle and a graveyard, it’d be easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.

There’s a bar and a clubhouse overlooking the pitch, which as the game progressed got more and more tempting. The weather was chilly to start, but by the end was bitter and it was pouring rain. I ended up catching a ride home with a friend of a friend.

Supporters had a covered… terrace… of sorts. Covered was all that really mattered, by the end. I actually poked around on the other side where there was more covered seating, but the crowd there was either unengaged, or engaged… to one the other squad’s players.

My view of the pitch:

It was a hard-fought, scrappy game, made so much worse by the worsening conditions. Kendal opened up the scoring, but in the process knocked Market Drayton’s keeper out of the game. After a lengthy wait, one of their defenders donned the keeper kit and play resumed for the first half. By halftime the score was even: one-one.

Kick off for the second half and within 30 seconds it’s 1-2 for Market.

There was a real sense of defeat hanging around, even the fans who still supported the chairman seemed to know Kendal was not doing well. There were several conversations either overheard or participated in on the nature of support and supporting. Kendal was, for a moment, a microcosm of supporter culture throughout the world. Show up to support the lads? Or avoid giving money to a FO that doesn’t care? There’s no easy or right answer there.

Regardless, a defender handled a ball during a goal line scramble and Kendal got awarded the penalty. Fan-favorite Aaron Helliwell lined up, and equalized.

By now, Kendal was playing much better, much more aggressively and Market was started to back down from that challenge. And the rain kept falling.

Finally, on an early cross from just outside the box, Ryan Moore comes flying in and heads it straight past the keeper.

It was a long, long ten minutes plus stoppage in the cold and in the rain, but eventually three whistles came and Kendal Town had three points, three impossible points. And I leave England four for four, perhaps far better than I could’ve ever expected.

Tomorrow I start the journey home. I’m ready to go back home. A cold is setting in, I’m homesick, our cat is probably so pissed off, and I still don’t get to see my Brigid again until the end of the week. Yet, this’ll always have happened. And I will and do remember it fondly.

Until next time, England.

Cheers.

Soccer, Travel

Newcastle 2 – Burnley 0

After the Glasgow trip, I actually took to relaxing for a day. When I originally scheduled the trip, the Burnley game was on Wednesday, but by the time I arrived it had been moved to Tuesday to better accommodate TV broadcasting, which meant folks back home could’ve (and did) watch the game. It also meant that I could write this after the fact instead of burning the midnight oil.

Monday

My day off was mostly spent writing. I recently restarted writing book 4 after months of staring at an incomplete manuscript thinking “this is garbage, I should’ve plotted it out better before putting word to page”. There were three goals that day: get a full English breakfast, go to the distillery, write. I don’t have any pictures of the full English because I was getting the feeling the place I was at was not happy to have me (fancy-smancy), but I did get to the distillery where I managed to complete chapter 1 in a single sitting, which is impressive for me. It was about 40% new stuff, 60% reused, and of the reused there was a decent amount of editing that went into it.

I also grabbed a bottle of gin and some socks for use at DCFC and Harper’s matches:

I also wandered around for a while and checked out the scenery again:

And finally I got dinner at a place where you can find this lovely mural:

I covered the whole “Anarchist Burrito” saga on my twitter. Needless to say, the folks running the place had noooooo idea who the Zapatistas were. But the food was decent, so I might go back, though I am being pressured to go to Greggs as I write this.

Tuesday

Tuesday started with a little bit of writing and a lot of refusing to wake up. I met up with a friend of mine from the States who is studying down in Durham just south of town, and we explored a bit more, stopping at the Strawberry and candy shop not far from the stadium. Then we headed back into town and parted ways so that I could get ready for the game.

After taking a nap and chatting with Brigid a little, I headed back to the Strawberry once more for one final Newcastle pint (I promised myself I’d take a day off drinking on Wednesday) and to soak in the atmosphere one last time.

While I was there I ran into a group from the Toronto-area and we hit it off, then all of us got cozy with some locals who were meeting up with their friend from Burnley, which was a lot of fun. And then, finally, the time came to pack back into St. James’ and enjoy life in the sun.

Or at least a massive array of day-bright lights that fucked with my camera.

I don’t know if I was just better awake this time, but the stadium was much more alive. Burnley is a bit of a boogey team for Newcastle, so there was a feeling that it’d be a bit of a fight. And the game was chippy. Burnley played a hard press most of the game to keep Miggy from fully utilizing his speed. When he could, it was always breaks down the wing, that’d eventually lead to traffic in the middle.

The crowd was much more into it. Chants were loud and often. It was a bit more like the Celtic match, with hits being celebrated as the game got pretty chippy toward the end.

Newcastle scored twice on the far side of the pitch from me before halftime, and the just about came down. During the second half, Burnley seemed to be inching closer and closer to a goal, but luck and Martin Dubravka saved us more times than many of us were comfortable with.

Miggy did have a few runs toward our end, as did Perez and Rondon. Some got tantalizingly close, but bad luck or good pressure kept me from seeing a goal up close.

It was a big win for us, as it pushed up over Burnley on the table and well out of the relegation zone, though the fight isn’t quite over yet. Fulham and Huddersfield are pretty much guaranteed to go down as of writing but only seven points separate Southampton at 18th and Newcastle at 13th. On the flip side, only five points separate Newcastle and Everton at 9th.  So at least the bottom half of the EPL is competitive.

The game ended, some people hung around to watch the monitors in the concorse, but I went to the foot trucks to get another disgustingly amazing steak and onion sandwich, which left me soaked in gravy.

All in all, Newcastle has been a lovely, wonderful city full of some great people. I loved every second of it and will definitely use today (Wednesday) to do a bit more exploring before the next bit of this journey – heading into the Lake District to watch Kendal Town and hopefully give them that Kendall bump I seem to be bringing with me.

As I sit here in my hotel room groggy and hungry (and definitely, probably going to Greggs after this), it’s a good time to think about all of this and try to process it all. But I can’t. I start to and then fade into just how crazy and amazing it all has been. I was really here. I really did see those games. Meet those people. Walk to and from stadium more times then I can count. Hopefully it won’t be twelve years in the making for the next time I get here.

Until then, I’ll miss it.

Soccer, Travel

Celtic 4 – Motherwell 1

Mon the Hoops!

This is coming to you after the fact, because the trip to Glasgow was an all-day affair. So basically what happened was that between the Huddersfield game and the Burnley game I had a two day gap and didn’t just want to sit around for two whole days aimlessly wandering because that would lead me to “aimlessly” wander back to the Strawberry and then drink all day.

So instead I purposefully wandered to Glasgow (known locally, apparently, as “Glesga”) and purposefully wandered into a bar and drank all day until it was time to do something really fun – go to a Celtic FC match, something I had originally planned on doing, but thought might’ve been a bit hard to do.

The day started pretty bright and early with a trip to the train station.

And of course a journey through the beautiful English countryside.

Look at all that majesty, folks. But I’m only kidding. The fog eventually broke up and there were some absolutely beautiful sights. Some I got pictures of, some that were blurry messes. Here’s the town of Alnmouth.

But I found Berwick-upon-Tweed to be absolutely picturesque.

Along the way I had a cuppa and not much else as I watched the scenery go by. Once we crossed into what used to be the “Marches” of southern Scotland it really was like crossing into a new world. The little farms and the grazing sheep gave way almost immediately to rocky hills and towering trees. None of which you could photograph at 70mph, but they were amazing, and I really do wish I could share. Scotland and England are equally beautiful countries for very different reasons.

I made a train change in Edinburgh, a city which I saw, for all intents and purposes, none of. Then another ride to Glasgow on a train I was only 75% sure was going to Glasgow. Luckily it did go to Glasgow. One of the ticket-punchers was amused that I was planning on doing this whole thing as a “round trip”, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that five hours down and five hours back is normal for a soccer fan in the US, and that’s by car, which does make it bother harder in some ways and easier in others.

Eventually I arrived in Glasgow and smartly got off a station early (could’ve probably gotten off earlier than that) which put me closer to an area of the city called “The Barras” which is sort of like Detroit’s Eastern Market, only a bit rougher around the edges and also entirely full of people I can’t understand. It wasn’t a long walk, basically down High Street and then along Gallowgate, and I swear every city here has a street called “Gallowgate”, which I assume comes from the street where the gallows and gates were and fucking hell guys.

I found Glasgow to be a beautiful city in that way that old European cities are. Even when they’re rough and tumble, there’s a history and a story to them that sort of overwhelms the anxiety or apprehension of being far from home and instead forces you to think about how that bar is casually older than your country.

On my way to the barrows I ran into five lads from Kempten, Bavaria wearing the skull and bones of St. Pauli and with a shout of “Forza Sankt Pauli” I had five new friends and they had someone who had a better chance of understanding the local gist, though really what some of the Glaswegians were saying was a total mystery to all of us.

They (and I, actually) had been told to go to a place called “Bar ’67”, which was a great place to start any Celtic match, as it turned out to be as Celtic as a place could be without just being the stadium.

Edit: The Kempten lads were Michael, Helmi, Dino, K, and Schlossi. It was Dino’s 20th or 50th birthday, none of us could figure it out.

The walk to Celtic park from the Barras is about 30mins. I heard conflicting information. Some folks told me that the walk took us through Rangers territory, but some local folks told me that wasn’t true. What we did piece together was that might’ve been the case even five years ago, but things have quickly been changing, with more Celtic bars popping up around Celtic Park and more Rangers bars around Ibrox.

Regardless, it was a long walk that involved buying fries from a  Pizza Hut so two of us could use the bathrooms. But as you make your way eventually the word “Paradise” comes to mind, as the massive stadium rises over a green hill and between the apartments and malls.

And we saw that it was good.

The game was massive, made more so by just how loud and just how into it the entire crowd was. Every hit on Motherwell was celebrated. Every hit on us was booed. When Motherwell manged to claw one back off a scrappy happening in the box, the Celtic fans booed and hissed so loud and so long I honestly thought the ref was going to relent and scratch it from the books.

And when we scored… oh when Celtic scored…

It brings me to tears thinking about it now. It was hugs and high-fives and arms around shoulders as we all cheered and chanted. And to think Celtic weren’t even playing their ‘A’ squad, but to these guys it didn’t matter. Celtic were playing and Celtic is Celtic, whether first, second, or third line.

I was planning on meeting back up with the Kempten crew, but I realized too late that if I didn’t take the next train to Edinburgh, I wouldn’t be catching a train to Newcastle. So I popped back into that closer station, skipping the one I was supposed to use, and headed back. Only to find that the usual train to Newcastle had been changed out for a different one. Luckily I figured out which was which and spread the word to some other Celtic fans who were headed back along the same way as me. The platform manager kept trying to explain and finally I had to say “I don’t care where it’s going, so long as I end up in Newcastle.” The Celtic fans headed to Berwick had a laugh too, we were all tired and drunk and just wanted to know we’d be home.

Actually, when they got off, one recognized me through the window and gave a wave. Because so far, football has done nothing but make me friends wherever I go here.

And I think that’s pretty amazing.

Soccer, Travel

Newcastle 2 – Huddersfield 0

HOWAY!

I don’t know how but as I write this it’s 6:00pm Newcastle time, I’ve had more pints than I can count, and mostly of those were free… and I find the more pints I have the more of a Geordie accent I pick up.

Let’s start from the beginning.

9:50am Feb 21, 2019 I ditched work to make a delivery at Roush, By 10:15 I was on the road back home to shower, change, then relax before heading to the airport. Flight starts bumpy over Lake Eire and again rough as we head out over the Atlantic, but other than that it was pretty smooth and I think over the 7 hours I got about 3 or 4 hours of sleep, non of it continuous.

As we approached London, there was no way of telling how high we were as the whole area was buried under fog:

This photo was taken at 1500~2000 feet:

If you look carefully, there are towers poking out of the “clouds”.

After landing in Heathrow I took the Tube 1.5 hours to King’s Cross, and then the train another 2.5 hours to Newcastle. Along the way my phone died, but not before I snapped this:

Which I grabbed at 9:30am, giving the poor girl working the trolley a laugh.

Eventually I made it to Newcastle proper, dropped my bags off at the hotel while they made up my room, and explored the city, including heading up to the stadium to grab my tickets from the box office. While I was up there I stopped at the Strawberry, the pub across the street from the stadium and the Irish Center (for some help with the Celtic game).

The next day (today as of writing) I had to recreate all that, starting with my base of operations until I head into the Lake District:

Snagged one of these from the Strawberry:

British bathroom light switches are on the outside and I forget every time:

View round the corner from my hotel:

The Chinese gate on the entrance to Chinatown and toward St. James’ Gate:

Some shots of the stadium:

Sir Bobby:

Alan Shearer:

And of course the Strawberry:

I got adopted by some locals and headed over to the Nine, the bar at the stadium proper:

And after a pint there I headed to my seat and holy hell was it a place and a half:

It was about this time that the realization of over a decade of being a Newcastle supporter was coming to life. I sort of broke down at the sight of it all.

It’s kinda of hard to describe, and I’ll probably talk about it more for game #2, but it was just a lot to take in all of a sudden.

Like seriously:

That red card:

Goal #2:

Do you think I’ll be able to make it back?

I did manage to grab some stadium grub:

Tomorrow I’m headed to “Glasga” to watch Celtic, and while I’m not certain I’ll be able to do a that-day update, I will certainly get something posted on Monday!

Cheers everyone.