My March schedule was not particularly great, but it did allow a few days for us to jet across the country to the garden state where we were informed that the weather was beautiful and summer-like. For two kids coming from Southern California, and having not endured a proper winter, we would ultimately disagree a bit about this, but it was unseasonably warm for New Jersey in March.
Our primary reason for visiting this often hostile land is Nicole’s grandma’s 100th birthday. After having made a special trip to see my Grandma in the booming metropolis of Wisconsin Rapids a few years back, that now makes two living grandmas who are centenarians. This statement is even more impressive because Wisconsin Rapids was mostly synonymous with smoke-belching paper mills and New Jersey isn’t exactly a blue zone contender either. Nevertheless, based on the evidence, it would appear that a combination of stubbornness, crankiness, and a bit of alcohol are the keys to long life.
In any event, this weekend also marked the beginning of the NWSL season for women’s soccer. And as fate would have it, they were playing at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey. This match is known as the “Challenge Cup,” though nobody is really sure what that means. It featured the San Diego Wave (who had the best overall season record from last season) versus Gotham FC (who won the championship last season). As you might surmise, a team that wins the championship could quite plausibly also have had the best overall record and have to then play themselves which could be awkward to say the least. The future format of this so-called “Challenge Cup,” is therefore uncertain.
We purchased tickets about an hour or two before the match, so all that were left were seats in the upper tier of Red Bull Arena which appeared to be the 70th row. It did give us a bit of a birds-eye view of things. Worth mentioning as well is the fact that we were bundled in multiple layers and puffy jackets to try and stay warm in this “summery” weather.
Gotham appeared to be the better team for most of the match, but they couldn’t put any goals away regardless, so at halftime the score still stood at 0-0. Between the two teams, there were maybe 15 well-known international players who play for the national teams of the United States, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Australia, and Sweden. With that being said, it wasn’t always easy to identify players from our distant vantage point.
It was a lot of back and forth throughout the second half and it looked like it was going to go into extra time, which we were too cold to endure. Mercifully, San Diego scored in the final minutes of the second half with a corner kick that found Alex Morgan for a header into the net. We promptly got up and left in hopes of leaving the very crowded stadium before everyone else. We had taken Lyft to the stadium because it seemed easier than hunting and paying for overpriced parking in the area. Lyft had also made a point of saying that they had special dedicated pickup areas during games, so it seemed like a good idea.
Unfortunately for us, this arrangement apparently doesn’t apply to women’s games, so there was no Lyft pickup area. And thanks to New Jersey’s finest, all the roads within a three block radius of the stadium were closed including a major bridge that crossed the river into Newark. They had Chris Christi-ed the bridge by shutting down all the incoming lanes. To make matters worse, they didn’t open these lanes to help the flow of exiting cars. They simply left them unused and unavailable to cars (and Lyfts) who might want to cross the bridge to pick up their fares. I got canceled on by multiple drivers because they simply couldn’t cross the bridge. Our only option was to then cross said bridge on foot and reschedule a pickup spot on the other side which now had gone up in price because of the surge in people exiting the stadium. We weren’t very happy about the organization (or lack thereof) of Red Bull Arena. This whole process took us over 45 minutes to go a distance of less than ten miles. Not great.
Each subsequent day we spent in New Jersey dropped about ten degrees. We departed from Newark when it was about 40 degrees and is expected to be cold and rainy for the rest of the week. We landed back in L.A. where it was “summer” again. We recharged in the sun and reluctantly prepared ourselves to go back to work until we have some more time off at the beginning of April.
passports & pepto bismol 