Fifth trip: Los Angeles

This season the Cardinal plays USC at the Galen Center on Friday, January 8th. Game time is (sigh) TBS, but supposing it will be 7pm as would be typical, you can sneak out of work early on the Friday afternoon, catch a 2pm AA flight or a 4:10 Southwest flight at SJC, grab a rental car and be at the Galen Center door in plenty of time. Well, enough time.

Once there you can see what kind of team the troubled USC Athletics administration has managed to scrape together (read Bob Kinder's analysis for the juicy details).

You get all day Saturday and Sunday morning to live it up in the greater L.A. Basin. What will you do with the time? Share with us in the comments, please?

The UCLA game will be on Sunday at (you guessed it) TBS o'clock 2 PM. Supposing it will be the typical 1pm, you can catch a 5:25 Southwest or You should be able to make the 6:45 AA return flight—but don't book this flight until the game time is announced. If there was a late decision to put the game on TV, the start time might be later.

If you would rather drive (the Travel page talks about the fly-drive trade-offs), you can schedule a leisurely start Friday, go down 101 with a lunch stop at Pea Soup Anderson's in Buellton, or someplace in Santa Barbara. With two drivers trading off the return trip up I5 can be completed on the Sunday night.

Local Trips: Davis and Fresno State

UC Davis

In our haste to write about the UConn trip we skipped over a local road-trip, Sunday November 22 to UC Davis. The route to Davis is 114 miles, and Google's estimate of 2 hours is conservative for a Sunday afternoon. Here's the route:

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The game time isn't set. If it's midday (1pm would be typical for a Sunday game) is 2pm, so it should be feasible to make the round-trip in a day. If it's later, see our Travel Page for a motel recommendation.

Fresno State

On Wednesday 12/30, at the ever-popular TBS 7 o'clock, the Cardinal plays the Fresno State Bulldogs in Fresno. It's a 3.5-hour drive over Pacheco Pass; here is a route-map:

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It's a bit hard to plan for this trip without knowing the game time. If the game starts in the middle of the day, it would be possible to make it a day-trip and be home that night. If Since the game starts after 6pm, you may want to think about a motel. Expedia lists a number of motels in Fresno at $40/night and up.

Possible Booster Buses

The FBC board have very tentatively discussed the possibility of running booster bus for either of these trips. If you would be interested in taking a bus to Davis, or to Fresno, instead of driving yourself, please send email saying so to travel@stanfordfbc.org. No bus will happen unless the board is pretty sure of enough riders to pay for it!

Second Trip: UConn

We continue our previews of the road trips of 2009-10. See the "Archive" menu on the right for the preceding ones.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 will be the historic date on which Stanford initiates a home-and-home series with the UConn Huskies. In coming years we will always be at away to UConn and at home to Tennessee, or vice versa!

The game will be played on the UConn campus in Storrs, CT at a time to be specified. (The time was 5:30 ET in a preseason schedule but has gone back to "tba" on the official Stanford schedule.) Stay-at-homes will be able to watch it on ESPN. But if you want the full experience (and no nattering Debbie Antonelli) you will have to travel to the game.

We've got logistic and booking tips on the Travel page. Here we just want to comment on the thoroughly miserable scheduling of this game. It falls on the first day of a national five-day holiday orgy:

• Wednesday, National Get Your Shopping and Wrapping Done Now day
• Thursday, Christmas Eve
• Friday, Christmas
• Saturday, National No Available Parking Space at the Mall day
• Sunday, National Buyer's Remorse and Recriminations day

And they expect us to travel over the best part of that? It's asking quite a lot of the fans.

The First Trip: ODU and Rutgers

We are starting a series of posts to preview the road trips of the upcoming 2009-10 season. Use this info to help plan your winter travels, make early reservations, or just to daydream a bit!

If you plan to make one of these trips, or if you have any other thoughts about travel, please add a comment below. Other FBC members will be interested. (Yes, really they will!)

First Trip: ODU and Rutgers

There is no easy fall tournament this year, no Virgin Island or Hawaii fun time. We get right down to business on Friday evening, November 13, when the Cardinal play on the Old Dominion campus in Norfolk VA. In our travel notes we assume taking an overnight flight from SFO on the Thursday night, giving most of a day to check into a hotel and poke around Norfolk. (We'll post some links to attractions later.)

The next game is at Rutgers on Sunday, giving a day and a half to traverse some very interesting territory (google map). The possibilities for sight-seeing are wide: you could stop off in Washington DC, in Baltimore, in Philadelphia; you could even have a day and night in Manhattan, and go out to Rutgers on the train. Update:We've put details of DelMarva Peninsula highlights on the travel page.

Those of us who attended the last game at Rutgers—Kayla Pedersen's impressive debut, the game won by Candice with a free-throw after Epiphany Prince made a silly foul—remember very well how "The RAC" is full to the rafters with loud, friendly, red-clad fans.

The Sunday game time is still TBS but, assuming a typical 1pm start, it 2pm ET will be easy to fly home to the Bay Area that evening from nearby Newark Airport. there is a Continental departure for SFO at 5:45 and a United flight at 6:20. There are no nonstops to SJC but several 1-stops via Denver.

Up next— Connecticut for Christmas eve...