Humidity is awesome!

I'm sitting in my plush hotel room at the Courtyard by Marriott in Raleigh (or is it Durham? Cary? It's near the airport...). I'm used to travelling with a junior hockey team, where I'd often be sharing a bed with someone, so getting a nice room to myself it pretty cool. By the way, whenever I think of Raleigh/Durham (which isn't often, I grant you), I think of this clip from The Simpsons (skip forward to 2:10).


Long day of travelling. American's MD-80s don't have TVs in them, so there was lots of card playing, reading, sleeping (me), etc. To the right is a picture I took with my phone..it's of Mt. Hood, shrouded in a cool looking cloud (I find things like this interesting). Short layover in Dallas, but long enough to run into a couple from Portland who are Timbers fans. It is funny to hear the conversations passersby will have with the Timbers: they're obviously a team of some kind, and it's fun to watch them try to figure out what the USL First Division is. A guy at the airport here asked if they were here to play UNC...I said, "they're below David Beckham, above college soccer."

The boys went to a giant mall nearby, and about ten of us had a pretty good meal at one of those big sports bars you see in suburban malls nowadays (like a Chili's with more TVs).

The team is in very good spirits (this is a really tight group, and they have fun together) ahead of tomorrow's game. Gavin's only real team talk tonight was to remind them of how much Carolina have to play for (in the hunt for the final playoff spot), and he exhorted them to "match [the Railhawks] effort." They know it's going to be a dogfight tomorrow.

--John