Travel to a New Country Solo

Like I mentioned in my introduction post, I love hockey and a life goal is to see a game at each of the NHL arenas. To give myself some guidance I decided to try and finish seeing the Original 6 teams before my 30th birthday (which won't happen now) so in November I traveled to Chicago, Boston and Detroit. I say finish as I have been to Toronto and New York already. This was the first trip that I had gone on outside of Canada all by myself which was a little scary. 

My first stop was to Boston, I had an early morning flight and thankfully it left basically on time as I only had less than 24 hours in before I had to get to the next city. Once I got to Boston, I got a bus to my hotel  from the airport but was unable to check in so I just dropped of my bag with the main desk. I headed out for lunch and decided to go to the Neptune Oyster restaurant. I've got a few "rules" for these NHL trips with one of them being have the local/well known dish of the city/area I am visiting. For Boston it is clam chowder so that is what I got. 

The Neptune is a pretty tiny restaurant so I ended up having to wait outside in a line for almost an hour. I was going to walk the Freedom Trail but by the time I finished eating, it was about 2pm already so instead I did the Sports Museum to learn about the history of sports in Boston. I wasn't expecting the museum to be on the upper concourses of the TD Garden so that was cool to see the ice surface from the box seats. The game I saw was an Original 6 matchup on Saturday night so it was a full house at the Garden. I don't like the Bruins but being there on a Saturday night was kind of special and I was happy to see them win on home ice, a dominating 6-1 victory against Chicago.

On Sunday, I flew to Chicago for the next stop on my vacation and it was another early flight. I took the train from the airport to downtown but I made a pit stop at the Greetings from Chicago mural first, which I forgot to actually look at. There was a restaurant nearby so I had lunch there (chocolate chip pancakes) since I was pretty hungry. Once I got to the hotel, I checked in then I visited the Shedd Aquarium for a couple of hours. The trains I took in Chicago were a bit freaky because most of them were on platforms and I'm scared of heights so I didn't like that part. I also lost data and my Visa card stopped working on this day so I was stressing out. 

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Chicago was playing the Pittsburgh Penguins and it was Evgeni Malkin's 1000th NHL game which was exciting. My second team is the Pens so I was cheering for them but I also would've been fine if Chicago had won. On Monday, I walked around and visited Cloud Gate. I've seen lots of photos of The Bean, which is a gigantic silver bean shaped sculpture, before and wanted to check it out. I didn't do to much more on that second day in Chicago, but I did go to Giordano's Pizza for lunch to get Chicago's deep dish pizza which was the best meal I had on my trip. 

As mentioned, I also visited Detroit and this part of the trip didn't go too well. I arrived to the city a little delayed then I had an hour bus ride to my hotel from the airport. However, the first bus broke down and the driver didn't let us know so I was very confused and I had to wait a half hour for the next one. I wanted to go to the Henry Ford museum but it was too late in the day plus it is closer to the airport which I didn't really realize while planning. After I checked in to the hotel, I just went to the Lafayette Coney Island restaurant for an early supper and got a Coney Dog. Mustard, raw onions and chili are things that I do not like but on a hot dog, they aren't bad. For the rest of the night, I just hung out in my room.My last full day was the day before Thanksgiving Day in the US and they were preparing for the parade so many of the main roads were closed so it was hard to get around on the bus. There was some kind of game place that I wanted to check out so I looked at the hours to make sure it would be open but when I got there it wasn't - I guess I looked at the wrong day. This left me a few free hours to kill before the game so I decided to go have food at Hockeytown Cafe and wait, however that restaurant didn't open until 4pm. The last game was the Red Wings versus the Nashville Predators with Detroit coming out on top so that was exciting. Little Caesars Arena is one of the newer ones and it is quite nice, the concourses are really big. They even had a drum band playing trying to hype people up. 

I was heading back home on Thanksgiving Day but as I was getting ready, I received a message that my flight to Toronto had been canceled because of fog. I waited for a little bit then I called the airline to see when they could get me on another flight but they already had. So instead of leaving Detroit at 11am, I would now be leaving at 4:30pm and going through Montreal. This gave me a chance to watch the parade though which was interesting. Even though I had some headaches and didn't get to see all the things I wanted to, I did have a good time and it was certainly an experience that I will learn from. 

Checking things off on the lists

30 before 30 - Travel to a new country solo ✓

Fall fun 

   - Cheer on an Original 6 team ✓

   - Look at vintage cars 𐄂

   - Check out the bean ✓

Photos of the arenas from outside

TD Garden - Boston Bruins
NHL arena 5 of 32

United Center - Chicago Blackhawks
NHL arena 6 of 32

Little Caesars Arena - Detroit Red Wings
NHL arena 7 of 32