Don't adjust your sets

You'd be forgiven for thinking that we've been really quiet and boring the last month or so. No blog post, very few photos, nothing going on. Exactly the opposite of course, we've been incredibly busy and I've been totally slack and not updated anything. Maybe the thrill of doing this has worn off, time will tell. In my last post I was ready to cruise down the QEW past Niagara Falls and on to Buffalo to see the Bills play the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL (grid-iron for the aussies).

The weather in Buffalo is usually much worse than Toronto, despite it being over an hours drive south towards what is mostly warmer temps. Something about the great lakes, and Buffalo's position on them, makes Buffalo's weather totally different from Toronto. Everyone, especially the locals, complain about the grey winters with no sunlight for weeks at a time, and Buffalo gets 2 to 3 times more snow than Toronto. All this is thanks to the 'lake effect'. Situated on the Niagara river, right where the waters of Lake Erie leave the lake for their fairly short journey downhill and over those famous falls, Buffalo is a small city, I think Darwin is bigger. The local NFL football team, naturally called the Buffalo Bills, are just one of three NFL teams in New York state, the other two are in New York City and of course have a lot more cash. The Bills where famous, or infamous, in the 90's for making it to 4 Super Bowls in a row and losing all of them. It's a blue-collar town and they have a blue collar team, but there's not much blue-collar about Ralph L. Wilson the team owner, he has loads of cash. Sport in North America is not like Australia, it's all about the cash here, teams are owned by individuals, or are at least beholden to stock-holders. Ralph owns the Bills, built the stadium with his own money when the city refused and then named the venue after himself. My buddy Albert and I set off for Ralph Wilson Stadium around 8am on a sunny Sunday morning, hoping to beat the rush/bottleneck at the border and make it with plenty of time for the 1pm kick off.
Sun on Toronto doesn't mean sun in Buffalo, I already mentioned the lake-effect right? But on this day the football gods must have been happy because Buffalo was bathed in sunshine and we could leave our jackets in the car. We had to stop at the border so I could get my visa-waiver and I had a slightly nervous moment when the official asked me to go to another building, one I'd not been asked to go to before. Images of cavity searches dancing in my head I was relieved to find that it was simply an 'over-flow' area used when they get busy, we scooted through pretty quickly and hit up the duty-free for some beers. The stadium is in the middle of no-where, sorta Waverley Park style, no public transport etc. You drive up a fairly normal two way, single lane street lined with houses, all the local home-owners use game-day as an opportunity to make some cash by charging for parking on their front lawns. The closer you are to the actual stadium car park the more it costs until you're almost paying the $25 they charge there. Everyone is tail-gating in the car park, some people were there over night, and they fire up the charcoal grill, tap a keg and settle in for some attitude adjustment. By 1pm everyone is pretty happy, but it's american beer so no ones too totaled. I picked up a Bills jersey and a cap and I'm glad that I didn't buy them at the duty free, they're surprisingly much cheaper to buy at the ground.

The game was pretty cool, we had great seats about 10 rows back from the 'fence' and on the 22 yard line (in the scoring zone). The crowd was pretty good natured, some young guys from Baltimore sat in front of us and the local Bills fans flicked pennies at their heads and gave them plenty of trash talk, but it didn't look like anyone was going to get beaten up. At half time they stop serving beer which tends to make everyone a little easier to handle when the game ends, although it was a bit of a bummer for Albert and I, we hadn't tail-gated all morning and were still thirsty. The Bills won the game pretty handily and the cheer leaders won a place in my memory, sweet.That's enough for today, man I can rattle on. I'll give you the news on Vegas and our plans for the next few months in another post RSN (real soon now).

Andy, out.