mkjr

Bear with me… there will be pictures… ;-)

I had started this venture back in December when my wife said I should go to SB48 if the Seahawks get in.

It was around the time when I was going to fly to watch Seahawks play the Giants…[that fell through for work reasons and timing…]. Both my wife and I love the hawks. I grew up watching them in Vancouver, BC and recall a few games from the king dome days. My dad also worked for a small steel detailing shop in Delta, BC that did some detailing on the Clink…or Seahawks Stadium as it was initially called. Sadly, he passed away this past August and did not get to see it being finished, nor the new World Trade tower in NYC…another steel job he worked on. I had tried to get to the first SB game without success.

So in early December my wife said I should start looking at points flights to NYC for the same so that I had the most flexibility in getting to and from NYC…

Shortly after that discussion and a trip to the winter classic hockey game (what a gong show that was – ah, another day), some space opened up for a flight from YYZ to JFK. Not my ideal location to get into NYC but opted for it always since LGA was not available.

That was booked on Jan 2nd. The same day I booked a Club Quarter’s property in midtown for 2 nights – price, 217 a night…golden. Now, wait and watch.

I also am a parent of a disabled child. As much as we like to leave our daughter with our in-laws in town, my MIL is battling lung cancer and doing OK but it’s tough to leave our daughter with them for more than a day or so. Thus, I would be on my own (although I sort of wished the SB was in a warm client since I would have brought my daughter also, now 7 – whose birthday I ended up missing because of the snow…f’ck].

So I started to track ticket prices around early Jan. People always say to me, “wow, you got SB tickets”…what they don’t know is that it is pretty easy to get tickets. What is hard is getting tickets at or close to face value from the hoards of people who get them either free or at face value but have no intention of going. I can say that I was checking all the various stubhub like sites and various aggregator sites, seatgeek etc. etc. and surmised that tickets really only moved on the 19th. Thankfully, since the pats were out and SF was out, I suspect both larger draws from NY and eastern fans, the price pressure was down.

So I tracked daily, sometimes several times a day and prices kept going down. The tickets I ultimately bought were $5400 on the 19th…..and thankfully, my brother in law decided to come along since I had to operate within his budget that was well below my own so I had to play a much longer waiting game.

Thankfully this paid off.

Now became the stressful part. So with a hotel booked with a cancellable rate and flights on points, if tickets did not come down, I could just watch from home…although they were coming down big time.

Now that they were going to clearly get into our budget, the weather became a huge nightmare. Our flights were to leave on Saturday out of YYZ…first out in the am to JFK. Now the snow was not forecasted to become heavy in YYZ until around 11 or 12. Turns out, we left just in time and managed to get out of YYZ when a massive snow storm caused cancellation of all flights to NYC, ORD etc. The typical short haul flights are the first to get cut.

I had bought my tickets on Friday, around noon. I think I missed the bottom by about 2 hours. Purchase was made via TNdirect…a stubhub like guaranteed seller…actually seller was a company called National Events Company in midtown. There was a brief moment that my heart almost stopped when the confirmation said I was to pick up the tickets at a subway restaurant near the venue…thankfully, that was autogenerated and NECo called right away to arrange to deliver to the hotel or pick up….

OK, tickets in hand, price was 2101 a/in each (face turned out to be 1500)….now worry about actually getting there. I had booked a car rental just in case. Turned out the snow would hold off….[at least on the way down]

YYZ-JFK
CRJ700
AA3517
06:20
08:05

Seat 5A (4500 avios and 30 bucks in tax)

Empty terminal 3….turns out it was because US pre-clearance lines were huge and they delayed the flight because of the same for about 20 minutes…f’xc….it took my BIL and I a minute to clear using global entry.



Down the AA CRJ Gates.







Valet check.







Lots of leg room.



Time to Deice….

Plane had to get another tug to push us back since the other one was just spinning its wheels in the ice. I have never been more nervous about needing to get off the ground.




What a sunrise…



Full cabin today.



Getting close.






Ahhh….landed….








And once I saw this familiar sculpture, step 1….complete. Wow…were here and we escaped the snow.

UTex09

good start - cool that it worked out and you could go, very exciting I am sure.

mkjr

Step one was to check into our hotel.

I had originally booked CQ but changed it since they only had one bed and I preferred not to share with my BIL. Then at the last minute booked the Grand Hyatt on LMT for around 20 more a night.

Turned out to be an official hotel and was a little depressing to see so many corporates going to the game with all the fancy passes etc. but not really caring much about who was playing...

Oh well. BTW, to the guy where the steelers jersey and saying omaha, omaha on game day to get people to move faster with the toaster, you sounded like a total bafoon....

Decent hotel.










Off to 2nd Ave. Deli to meet up with FIL's cousin and to fuel up...the broker was not yet open for business.







Checking out the special store in Macy's...wholly there is lots of people....


Turned out this was as close as they would get to Wilson in the games also...







Now off to get our tickets.

Turned out, National Events office is right on the SB ave set up...which meant it was a mess to get up the street....



AND here they are....



I think that if you use the NFL fan can you can find a very blury photo of me and my BIL....

mkjr

It was probably at this point that I relaxed a little.

We went back to the hotel safe and locked up the tickets in the room safe. They had all the required security features and NECo was a great company to deal with. We did see a guy buying a parking pass for $1500 so that he could have a private car ready to take one of their group back to the airport early…are you freaging kidding me???

Went down to the 9-11 memorial.





Flying the 12 flag over lower Manhattan…a little cheeky given when we popped into the Marriott in lower manhattan it looked to be where the family and broncos organization was staying…let me tell you when we showed up there with our Seahawks gear we felt like pilgrims in an unholy land….



Opted to hit up John’s for some pizza and several pitchers of beer.





So good and primed, my BIL decided we needed some noise makers. We proceeded to buy the absolutely loudest but tiny “mini” vuvuzelas. We told the guy at the store that if they sucked for noise, we would only pay 1 each but they turned out to be loud so we paid 5….found out on Ali express they are about 2 or 3 cents per 5000. The fans around us really despised these….well, broncos fans despised these. But hey, what are you supposed to do at a hawks game anyway other than make so much noise you can not hear yourself think.

Back up to SB boulevard. Was jammed.






A little late to try to kick a field goal.




A good omen.

mkjr

Wow…they sure did tear down SB boulevard fast.



Now my BIL wanted to wait to leave to the game around 3:30pm…I thought that would be silly. Turns out, it would have been.

We did catch a glimpse of Broadway Joe (on Broadway) before he almost screwed up the coin toss. Left at 1:45 from the date stamp on my photo.




So we booked our tickets on NJ transit because that was what they recommended you do. And guess what, apparently they only figured 15000 people would do that but instead 30000 did.

They were totally not prepared. It was a complete mess. Thankfully we were not in the first few groups. I heard it was even worse for them. As train after train came in and no one moved but yet another train let the passengers out, what a total mess.

On the train…”don’t you ever talk about me…” ;-)





Seahawks only train.





We literally did not move for 40 minutes.



Second train to Met.





And the beautiful empty parking lots…[face palm]



Then through security again….which was not too bad.





Thank god it was warm out…waiting in snow and cold…no way.



More strict security than an airport.



Almost there…




And were in.

So it took us 2:35 minutes to travel from Penn station into the venue...not bad.

mkjr

Firstly, wanted to check out our seats.

Wow. Even better than I thought. Basically right on the Bronco’s goal line behind the broncos although fans were pretty much spread out all over the place. No one side had more than others at least so far as I could tell.



Since this is probably my first and possibly only Super Bowl, I was not going to miss anything. So we grabbed a lobel’s steak sandwich and a bottle of water and I basically monitored my water intake the entire game and did not leave my seat from about 5:17 to the end of the game.

Yikes. The food was very expensive.



But tasty.



I also did not take too many pictures of the “actual” game since I did not want to run out of battery etc. and I knew I would have lots of recorded footage of the game.

Our view looking directly forward. We saw lots of action here. And even Lynch picking up some skittles from the endzone….



Some other random shots.

mkjr

I can tell you that it was loud. Really loud. I was hardly able to talk for several days after the game. When Manning missed the opening snap, you have no idea how much noise there was. I was blowing so hard on my mini vuvuzela that I almost passed out. Watching the fx on NFL after the fact and having the broncos coach say to manning that it was a little louder than they thought it would be made my almost passing out feel totally worth it.

Halftime show was awesome. I was amazed at how 3 LED’s on a touque with some sort of Bluetooth connection could do what it did in terms of crowd participation.

Suffice to say that for most of the first quarter I was literally shaking. I should have had a shot or something but by the second quarter, I was less nervous. It was when Pearcy ran back the kick off that I started to think, wholly sh$t…they might actually win.

Now, I know what it is like to lose the big game. I know what it felt like to watch the Steelers win, although it was a little easier since my brothers friend from high school got his ring that game, and being the hockey fan, that I am, I have seen 5 Stanley cup hockey games in which the Vancouver Canucks have played (2 in 82, 1 in 94 and 2 in 11) and each game I saw, they lost. I saw them loose to the islanders in 82 and also watched them lose two game 7 games to the rangers and “that” Boston team in 11. I know how the Denver fans felt. It sucked…but boy o boy did this win feel good!!!!!

mkjr

Apparently staying in the venue was a good idea since the same mess getting to the game was playing out getting back to the city.

NJ transit completely incapable with dealing with the people they encouraged to take the train. What a mess. There was a notice to patrons in the stadium to remain in the stadium.





We walked down after about an hour and 30 minutes after the game and they were directing people to the club level to wait. They also opened the concessions. Too bad they did not give us some food or sell some alcohol. I could have used a beer by then.

Finally, we said screw it and managed to make our way back to the hotel.



Still lots of people.



We ended up getting back to our hotel at 1:30am.

Now, checking the weather information lead us to the conclusion there is going to be snow in NYC starting soon…LOTS AND LOTS of snow.

Now, if it was up to me, I would have gone to EWR, right then (remember, I have not been drinking) and driven home. EWR had a few Ontario plated cars at National. My mistake was to take a chance and/or listen to my BIL. Snow started early and it looked as though we were going to get out.

I tentatively booked a rental car at JFK and although could not tell, from the one way rates, I suspected they must have had some Ontario plates there.

I did not cancel it.

The problem was that the snow was wet and heavy. If it was cold and dry, this would have been a total non issue but heavy wet snow requires way more time to de-ice/anti-ice. Way more time and flights to YYZ/ORD/BOS/PHL/IAD etc. are very very very low on the priority pole at JFK with heavy wet snow.

Hats off to our pilot who managed to get us 4th for take off when JFK closed the runway….

Same seat as before. Lots of leg room but as the de-ice and anti-ice (nice green glop) took more and more time, I felt less and less hopeful we were going anywhere.

Heavy wet snow…



Window covered with anti-ice…or radiator fluid… ;-)



So after giving it the college try, we had to come back to the terminal.

They said the flight was going to try again at 11:30 but then shortly after it was cancelled outright.

My BIL was very upset. He had to change another flight back to Vancouver although had we just driven earlier in the morning we could have been to Rochester by then.

Thankfully my sister called National and they still had the car and it was Ontario plated. Finally, we were rebooked on the 8 out of LGA. I laughed. I asked the agent if she honestly thought it would get out…’Off the record”…she said no. I agreed with her. Some others were hopeful. Ended up all flights were pretty much cancelled for the remainder of the day.

So with our 8pm boarding cards in hand, we head over to the national car rental area. Ended up getting 4 or 5 levels of upgrade to a sport utility because it was one of the 3 Ontario cars they wanted to get back to YYZ. I had the pick of them.

Brushed off the snow and left the JFK National lot at just before 1pm…..and was home in YYZ at 10:15pm with a stop for some food and gas twice.

Car ended up being US$135 for a one way rental…score. The drive was white knuckle, thankfully I am used to snow and the roads were well cleared. I opted to go up to Albany since the storm was tracking more over PA and shorter would have meant more time in snow…sure enough, once we were 80 miles south of Albany, NOTHING. Bare roads and then sent the cruise control at 74 and away we went!

mkjr

So this was truly a plane, train and automobile trip.

AA did their best to get us out in JFK. I fly enough between YYZ and NYC for work that in the winter, they really can not do much. Like with thunderstorms in the summer. And flights between the two cities get cancelled first.

I could have lived with driving both ways and fortunately have driven between the cities several times so it was not a big deal. I do like to drive and don’t mind it really.

All in all, it was a great trip. I am very privileged to have been able to attend and see this in person. It would have been nice for my wife to have seen the game also but perhaps they will be back in Phoenix. If they are, both my wife and my daughter will be along…cost irrelevant.

I did get a text at 4pm notifying me that the 8pm was cancelled. By then, we were just south of Albany. At least this meant I would get my points back.

Hope you enjoyed.

thearmada

Great TR! It looks like a very cool experience to say the least.

catmndu

Go Hawks!

Thanks for the report. I grew up in Washington State admiring the likes of Jim Zorn, Steve Largent, and so on.

huojimmy

Great pictures, the steak sandwich really attracts me!

krazykanuck

Good pics! I had a couple of Seahawks friends who were at the game live posting photos on FB while I watched on a TV. Hope someday a team I care enough about gets to the big game so I can have an excuse to go!

SFO777

mkjr, thanks for the great report and pics of your Super Bowl trip.
What an enjoyable read, even in Denver.

avneeshj

Awesome TR! I loved the parts how you explained about getting the tickets. As a non American it's interesting to me how crazy America gets about Superbowl.