Let’s start with a disclaimer. I don’t like flying.
Well, maybe not flying, per se. But the idea of it. Thirty thousand feet above the heartland or the eastern shoreline or the Atlantic Ocean. It has never been my idea of fun.
Nor is the fact that once you get out of the cramped seat where you ate the stale cookies and sipped on what really amounts to a quarter of a cup of Coca-Cola, then what do you do? Scramble to find baggage claim. Run around looking for the rental car kiosk. Or even worse, trying to find another gate in another terminal in the 45 minutes you have to make your connecting flight, when one wrong turn can get you lost in an airport bigger than the town in which you live. All alone.
I fly quite a bit, but those planes seem to take me where I’m totally comfortable only half the time — unless I’m going to Tampa, because after working seven spring trainings and three bowl games there, I can get around the airport without the signs and the city without a map. Even there though, the feeling flying home is always so much different than flying away.
By the time you read this column, I’ll have flown across the ocean, spent an hour in Oslo, Norway, and hopefully found a cab to get me to my hotel about a mile down the road from Croke Park in Dublin, Ireland. Penn State opens the 2014 football season there Saturday morning against Central Florida, and that’s why I’ll be there, writing about the experience for you.
In this business, that’s why we fly. We go where the games are.
I’ve been told as I’ve planned this trip the last few weeks that Dublin is a wonderful city, and that Ireland is one of the most picturesque countries anyone could ever hope to visit, and that I should bring sweaters and an umbrella and Euros and to plan a weeks-long vacation to go back in the future, because that’s the only way to see Ireland properly.
As long as Bardarbunga, that Icelandic volcano that has seemed on the verge of eruption the last week, stays quiet, I won’t be in Europe long enough to get comfortable.
The Nittany Lions have events planned around Dublin — a bus tour of the city one day, dinner at
the famous Guinness Storehouse another — and fans will likely pack the Temple Bar area, where the Croke Park Classic will be celebrated all week. But as far as cultural events go, that’s about it. The sights and the sounds are the sidebar.
“We’re not going to see the countryside,” Penn State coach James Franklin deadpanned during Penn State’s football media day earlier this month.
Penn State won’t have time to get comfortable, either. The team was scheduled to land in Dublin about an hour before I did today. They’ll clear customs and just a few hours later, they’ll have their typical Wednesday practice at University College Dublin.
This is all about a football game, after all.
Funny, because as uncomfortable as flying and landing where nobody knows your name can be to me, it has to be somewhat similar for a football team, in a country where their sport is hardly the talk of the national landscape.
Nothing is typical about a trip like this, yet Franklin and his staff will bend over backward to make this a typical week. Practices on schedule. Meals that don’t differ much, if at all, from what they would have eaten had they never left University Park. And, on Saturday, a football game that matters.
In their business, you fly where the games are. But they have to have so many questions, too. This is a new year and, in many ways, a new team. Franklin has never coached a game at Penn State. For all the ideas and innovative approaches his gifted coaching staff has talked about implementing since January, nobody knows quite how this is going to go yet.
We’ll have to see, and Central Florida will have to see and, certainly, Penn State will have to see Saturday, in a foreign land across an ocean, far away from anything they really know for sure.
This is a business trip for a football team, and no cultural experience ever erases the reality that the flight home seems a lot better for the team that gets the W.
For me, it’s about remembering outlet adaptors and Euros and little details and that I’ll be home soon.
For the Nittany Lions, it’s about taking in as much of Ireland as they can while still maintaining some of the routine that has helped them back home. That’s going to be a challenge in a time zone five hours ahead of theirs, when midnight comes at 7 p.m. and the sun is up long before what they know as the dawn.
(Donnie Collins covers Penn State football for The Times-Tribune. Contact him at dcollins@timesshamrock.com and follow him on Twitter @psubst.)