Carolina on my mind.

(Sorry James Taylor... I couldn't resist.)

Hector and I were in Raleigh for the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals.
A site survey to see how the broadcasters set up, how the Off-Ice Officials do their thing, some of the additional needs are handled by the League… Just a fact-finding trip.
Hector spent his time with Dan-O from the League and the Off-Ice guys


I spent most of the time up on the catwalk over the home and away benches,

working on a tool to help the scoring crew with getting Time-On-Ice info for the players in a timely and accurate manner.


What was a problem was the overall timing on the trip-
Up at 5:00 for a 7:00 AM direct flight to Charlotte,
(Yes, it was the most feasible flight to take- No direct to RDU, and any connected flight got us in much later than the CLT flight and the drive to Raleigh. Also they were more expensive…)
We got to the RBC arena at about 11:30-
We were there all day- with the exception of an hour for lunch at Damons, (100 yds from the Arena), game at 8:15, ending at 11:00pm.
We had a 9:00 flight out of Charlotte, so we decided to drive back after the game, rather then try to make the drive all the way after 3 hours of sleep in Raleigh… So we hit the road at 11:30 or so.
I was beat- I made it from Raleigh to past Greensboro, and when I couldn’t do any more, Hector drove the last 60 miles to the airport. We got in at 3:15 or so…
We got a room at a Fairfield Inn right at the airport and got a wake up call for 7AM; Hector set the alarm on his cell phone and I also set the bedside alarm for 7. I got 3 good hours of sleep on Monday night.
We got up on time, and made it to the airport with lots of time to spare…
I even got a bulkhead seat with no one in the center seat. Nice.

Back to Jax- Headed to the office to drop off my videotape with The CodeMonkey and set my Out-of-Office assistant for “never-coming-back” and I was outta there!