Road Trip(s)

so, chad and i have formulated a new road trip plan for this hockey season. we will have two (maybe three) road trips spread throughout the regular season. the road trips will begin with a trip to the gwinnett center on saturday, 11/26. the next trip will be (maybe) to the phillips arena in atlanta on saturday, 1/21 to see the thrashers play the tampa bay lightning. our final planned trip of the season will also be to atlanta, but this time we will be seeing the philadelphia flyers on saturday, 3/18 (the last weekend of spring break). this plan has been modified from the original one, which had us going to tampa to see the lightning play the flyers, due to pricing. the same seats in tampa that we paid $70 each for two years ago will now cost us $99 each. seating in an equivalent section in the phillips arena will cost us $65 per ticket. chad is also convinced that we won't need to stay overnight in atlanta. while it is a little closer to mobile than tampa, i'm not so sure about this. best case scenario, both games start at 6:00 central time, end at 8:30 central time, and we make it back to mobile in 5 hours. that means we get home at 1:30 am central time at the earliest. i'm going to bet that it's more like 2:30 or 3:00 am. i dunno. chad thinks he can drive that. he does have funny sleeping habits when he doesn't have to work the next day... and it would save us the money we'd spend on a hotel room. i think that's really why he doesn't want to spend the night. and that's where the "maybe" regarding the atlanta/tampa bay game comes in. he would rather let me have what i want and go see atlanta play philly in march than go see tampa play in atlanta in january. isn't that sweet? we could go see both games, but he's kinda cheap. plus, he'd watch it on center ice anyway... and we'd be missing another ice pilots game. oh well. we're definitely heading to gwinnett next month, so we can worry about atlanta later.