Philly, Here I Come!

it is official now, guys. chad and i are going to philadelphia in march. that will be an extremely busy month for me, with two scientific conferences (one at the beginning of march and one at the end of the month), the usual pilots games, probably a camping trip to port st. joe with the in-laws, and now a 4-day, 3-night excursion to philadelphia. i'm going to freeze my ass off in philly the 2nd week of march, but i'm going to love it. if i survived connecticut that time of year, i can definitely handle philly.

i bought our tickets for the flyers/panthers game on march 8th today. i even saved us $13 by ordering them through stubhub.com (where season ticket holders and others can offload tickets they aren't going to use) instead of through ticketmaster or the flyers website. that $13 kept the order from being over $200 (yeah, dudes, NHL tickets are pricey...well, good ones are pricey). they're pretty good seats. lower level, 12 rows up, in the corner, at the end where the flyers shoot twice. basically, they're in the same place as our seats in pensacola, only a few rows higher up. and they're better than any seats we could get by ordering them through the flyer website. i checked. and there were worse seats selling for more dinero on stubhub. i think i did good, especially considering that $80 each for the tickets, the 10% stubhub fee and the $12 shipping and handling charge (2 day shipping via fedex) still came out to be less than the total price would have been through other methods.

i also booked our flights and hotel today. we will be staying at the holiday inn philadelphia stadium, which is just about as close as we could get to the wachovia center. no parking trouble for us. we aren't going to bother renting a car while we're there. we'll take a taxi from the airport and then take the subway and trolleys wherever else we want to go. we'll be flying out of pensacola (which is $80 cheaper than flying out of mobile and the same price as gulfport) on march 7, hanging out in philly before the game, cheering on the flyers against florida march 8, then taking a trolley tour of the city on march 9, visiting the liberty bell and the constitution center and whatever other historical places we feel like, and we can't forget that we'll also visit the rocky statue and take lots of pictures. then we'll head back home on march 10.

i can't wait. i'm so excited. hopefully, the flyers' atrocious preseason record isn't an indication of how poorly they'll do during the regular season. i want them to actually win when i go to philly.