Friends and Football Stadiums Round Out Our Visit

November 3-5, 2016
College Park, Maryland - Glen Allen, Virginia

Although both NFL home teams in this area are division rivals of our own favorite teams, we still want to visit their stadiums. Not spend any money there of course, just see them :-)

The closest is naturally the Washington Redskins, less than 20 miles away. When it first comes into view I'm trying to figure out why the colors are orange, green and purple when the team's are gold and burgundy. The stadium sort of looks like a circus tent with those weird colors.

Oh. It's FedEx stadium, and those are the sponsor's colors. While all the other stadiums we've seen have the sponsor's name everywhere, this is the first one that adopted their colors as well. I'd be very unhappy if this were the home of my team!

With tents all around the bottom, and those colors up top, it is impossible to tell what team plays here. Sad.

The corporate "take over" is unpleasant and we just drive around without stopping. We're glad to add another stadium to our "we saw it in person" list, but we can move on. I'm sure Bill is secretly happy that a team in his division has our least favorite stadium so far :-)

Turning north we head for the home of the Ravens in Baltimore. Not the nicest area of town, but that has been the case for others as well. 

At least we can tell this is where the Ravens play! Bright purple clearly dominates, statues of Johnny Unitas and Ray Lewis proudly flank the entrance. Even the parking lot shows team pride. Though they are my team's division rivals, I'm glad to see they've maintained their identity.

Subtle branding. Much better.

Dreaded him when they were playing my Steelers, but the guy is an amazing athlete. Respect.

Long before they were the Ravens, Unitas was the football player. His record is more than impressive.

I should have just let it go. But I trash-talked the trash cans and then the Ravens beat the Steelers the next night. Sorry guys.

After covering miles on foot, and trying to absorb all we saw the last couple days, it was a very relaxing day of auto exploration.

Bill's family knew the Sparkmans before their move to Eagle Mountain, his mom babysat the kids. One of those kids is Chris Sparkman who is friends with us on Facebook. He reached out when he saw our location and drove up from Virginia on Friday for a visit.

Great to get caught up with him, and hopefully we talked him into coming to next year's reunion!!

Friends for over 50 years!

Our afternoon was spent on a much less fun visit - to urgent care. Wanting to take advantage of the Kaiser Permanente facility to check on some issues I'm having, we made the drive to Tyson Corners. Not much resolution, still working on it.

Never a fun view.

Saturday we drive south to state #22 - Virginia! So much history here, but not sure how much we'll get to see.

Kosmos Village is a no-frills park on Highway 1. No showers or restrooms, just FHU sites on a gravel lot with small grass in between. The office is closed and the only vacant spot is ours, marked reserved. 17 RV sites on the highway with a trailer park in the back. We're only here because I screwed up on where the medical center is, but we've already paid the $40/night so we'll make it work. 

Next we enjoy historic Fredericksburg.