Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Rules of the Road Trip

by Todd Maternowski

Top of the morning, hockey fans! Last week we discussed what we were thankful for --the first such writing assignment of that type since I was in third grade, which works out, considering I write at a second grade level. I was going to write a follow-up column entitled Whose Face Needs Some of My Stuffing, but have decided to scrap that for the time being and instead focus on recent Stars-related events. Specifically, road trip, baby!!!

Is there anything more fabulously fantastic, more significantly superior, more adverbially adjective than a road trip? My hope for the Stars is that one day, Gary Bettman will have expanded the league so far and wide that there will be an NHL team on Tierra Del Fuego, thereby forcing all of the other 213 NHL clubs to make the theoretically greatest road trip ever, every year! Wouldn't that be awesome?! Yes. Yes it would be awesome.

The Dallas Stars just began a road trip out East, playing six games in nine days against the Atlantic Division clubs: New York, Long Island, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Philly and Columbus. With that in mind, I'm presenting my Rules of the Road to the Stars, ensuring that they have a successful and fun trip that will result in fond memories and high-fives for decades to come.

Rule #1: Bring Your Own Music -- In a cultural backwater like the Greater New York Metropolitan Area, you never know what sort of unlistenable crap will be on their one radio station. That's why on any road trip it's important to bring your own CDs: otherwise, you run the very real risk of having to listen to some Joan Baez wanna-be flagellating his genitalia with an acoustic guitar for eight straight hours. If worse comes to worse, you can turn the radio off and listen to Antti, Nik and Jussi sing Finnish folk tales full of love and adventure.

Rule #2: Pack Your Own Food -- They say New York and environs is the Great Melting Pot, where you can find Laotian, Italian, Irish, Egyptian, Persian, Russian, Arab, Chinese, English, Moroccan, French, Inner Mongolian, Brazilian, Hippie, Thai, Vegetarian, Sylvan, Orcish, Troglodyte, Giantkin and Infernal, all apparently mixed together. How disgusting is that?! If you've got a hockey game against the Islanders coming up, the last thing you want entering your mouth is a bunch of hippie crap that tastes like a cross between vulture feces and a desecrated human corpse festering in a swamp. You need real food. That's why you should avoid eating at any restaurants and stick to the PBJ's in the cooler.

Rule #3: Maps are for Pussies -- Taking a road trip in Texas is like flying through the outer reaches of space: take a wrong turn, and you'll be 700 miles off course before you know it. The East Coast, however, is compact and easily navigatable: you can walk across most of those states in like half an hour, making even the idea of "getting lost" a nonsensical proposition. Additionally, all hockey players are from Canada, and have an innate sense of where the North Pole is at all times. If I ever see a Dallas Star holding a map, he also better be wearing a ballerina outfit and have a sign on his back saying "I AM A HALF-HUMAN, HALF-VAGINA HYBRID". Unless it's Mike Modano. He probably uses maps all the time.

Rule #4: Do Not Travel with Anyone You Would Not Like To Share Your Life Story With -- Ever been on a road trip where no one said a word, and the silence was deafening? Yes? Really? Was it a prison bus? In all normal road trips, you'd best be prepared to listen to some of the most pointless/hilarious/coma-inducing stories ever told. Remember that time Steve Ott kicked that one guy's ass in that one hockey game? No? Well, you will after this trip. Did you know that in the Red Army, they grind your testicles between granite blocks if you ice the puck? Sergei Zubov's got a million of those. And don't think you will be the exception to the Rule: after listening to Matt Niskanen's battle stories for the 19th time, you too will succumb, and pretty soon everyone has to her your boring-ass story about how you killed all those nurses last week and what tedious experiments you're performing with the holy man chained in your basement.

Rule #5: Keep Your Mind Occupied -- In the cultural wasteland that is the East Coast, the excitement of a long road trip can quickly wear off: what was once a boisterous bus full of jacked-up males with wooden sticks and sharpened steel can soon turn into a big mess of drowsy zombies staring blankly at the craptacular scenery the East Coast has to offer. This is why it's important to keep the energy up. one great way to do this is to play intellectually stimulating games. Zubov's "Devushka or Babushka?" is a good one. Nik Grossman's a walking repository of Swedish Historical Facts. Trevor's got a very amusing one-man show, "My Cross-Ice Pass From Phillipe," complete with props and everything. If all else fails, you can always ransack and pillage a random gas station. Low-lying coastal areas are used to that sort of thing.

Well, with those rules in mind the Stars should have a very pleasant road tripping experience. Tune in next week, when the Stars find an abandoned and shivering Alexei Yashin on the side of the Jersey Turnpike, and debate whether or not to keep him.