As Sept turned to Oct, I flew up to Portland to meet up with my friend Elizabeth. The purpose, to drive up to Vancouver BC to see the Timbers take on the Vancouver Whitecaps in the last “Cascadia Cup” match of the season. Unfortunately, the result of the cup competition was already decided for this season (damn flounders)…but we were still in playoff contention and definitely could use the 3 points against one of our natural rivals. The game was on Sunday Oct 2nd in the early afternoon, so we headed up Saturday morning to make sure we’d have plenty of time to check out some events planned by the Timbers Army (and we would have had to leave super early to make it to the match on Sunday if we had left the same day).
Because of the early start time, and the request from the Whitecaps front office that we be in the stadium a couple hours before kickoff, the morning meetup was pretty early (at least for the folks that had stayed out late partying the night before). Since we had all been pretty tired from the drive on Saturday, we had ended up crashing pretty early. As a result, I got up at a fairly normal weekend time for me (around 7am), got ready and went for a walk. It was an absolutely gorgeous morning with hardly a cloud in the sky. It wasn’t until closer to game time that the projected cloudiness appeared at all…and that was just some light cloud cover at that. One of the great Pacific NW fall days for sure.
There were around 500 of the Timbers Army in town to support the team. The pub we met up at to pick up our match tickets was about 1 kilometer away from BC Place (the stadium). Being the best supporters around…we sang the entire way there. It made for some interesting looks for the friendly natives.
Despite being inside the stadium before any of the local fans, the we were all up singing and waving flags from the moment we got to our seats until the end of the match. We were apparently a little loud, as friends watching on TV told us later that you could only hear the TA chants and barely anything from the Whitecaps fans. Our newly favorite chant of the day “Our House, in the middle of BC” was pretty accurate (especially as we won the match).
It was a great time, even if I didn’t get to see much of Vancouver (since we left to drive home right after the match). I definitely want to go back and visit for a longer trip sometime soon. More pictures from the trip and the match are HERE.