A Quick Trip to Viking Land

Guest post by Don

When the National Football League (NFL) schedule for 2022 came out last April, I got the wild idea that Sarah and I should go to a Minnesota Vikings home game. I was interested in seeing the relatively new and much-praised stadium in Minneapolis, Sarah had grown into a passionate Vikings fan, and I wasn’t getting any younger.

So seats and flight tickets were purchased for the October 30 game against the Arizona Cardinals. I also got a ticket for son Reid who still lives in the Twin Cities, and he agreed to be our guide to and from the stadium.  

Sarah and I seldom travel without Lauri, and when we do go solo, we seem to attract travel annoyances. Our last trip to Minnesota started with wheels falling off a roller-bag on the way to the terminal and Sarah slamming her thumb in the rental car door. So we were both wondering what this trip had in store for us.

This trip was going to be quick as Sarah had no time off from school. We left Friday, October 28, after school for Bradley airport in Hartford. Our first challenge was trying to get in the self-park lot using a QR code from our parking reservation. I had limited experience with QR codes and of course I had trouble getting it to scan and open the lift gate. After a few minutes of scanning every which way with both phone and my member card, the gate finally opened. We parked the truck and waited a bit for the shuttle bus, which in the past, was always at your vehicle by the time you got your gear together. This time: no show. We decided to walk to the entrance gate/booth area to wait. We saw other people waiting. In 10-15 minutes the shuttle finally arrived. The driver said they had an unusually high volume of customers, thus the delay.

Getting through security was a breeze, and we had a quick dinner at McDonalds where using the touch screen order system I managed to order two entrees for Sarah. Our flight left on time.  Once in Minneapolis we headed to Thrifty car rental via tram and lots of walking. Then the fun really began.  

I had pre-paid for the rental car, which saved some money. The agent still needed to run my credit card, however, since the pre-pay still had a balance due. But my card wouldn’t work in their system. I offered to use another card, but he said it must be the same card I used to pre-pay. But, between the time I had made the reservation and our trip, my original card had been compromised by someone charging over $1,000 at a nail salon. So my card had been canceled and a new one issued. No matter, they had to have the original card for the system to work, a card which no longer existed. The attendant said we should go see the manager on duty at parent company Hertz upstairs, meaning taking the longest escalator known to man to the next floor in the sky. Once at that counter, the woman took my info and my credit card but came up with the same answer: no go! She then said she would call the manager on duty, which surprised me since I thought she was the manager! After her call she told me the manager said that I would have to call Thrifty’s main office to get this straightened out. By now it is 9 p.m. on a Friday night, and I’m thinking who in their right mind would even be on duty or care at Thrifty headquarters. So I told the attendant to forget it in a disgusted tone and stormed back down to Thrifty, Sarah trying to keep up and a bit bemused and likely embarrassed by seeing her Dad so angry.

At the Thrifty counter, I told the agent I just wanted to do a new agreement for a car and I would deal with the original rental agreement after the trip to try and get my pre-pay refunded. I also told him I knew there was a car available since I had one waiting that they wouldn’t give me! With a new agreement in hand we got to our rental and soon discovered that it reeked of cigarette smoke and the headlight high beams didn’t work. No matter, we were not going back to the counter again!

We arrived at Dale and Pattie's house in Little Canada in a half-hour and had a fun chat with Pattie (Dale works nights). We were asleep about midnight.

Next morning, Saturday, we were up early to leave for Brainerd, Minnesota, for a lunch date with some of my former colleagues who retired to the area. I had printed maps from Google Maps to Barry Christenson’s house south of Brainerd, about 120 miles north of Little Canada. The maps were very useful in getting lost, since I soon discovered that the road numbers/names on Google Maps in rural areas do not always match the actual road signs. So we missed one major turn, discovering our error in a few miles as we passed a lake we weren't supposed to pass. We made it to Barry’s soon after backtracking. Joining us for lunch with Barry and his partner June were Maggie and Larry Anderson and their old friend and retired refuge manager Doug Mullen, who happened to be visiting. We had hoped to see Charlie and Cheryl Blair, but they were in Missouri visiting family.

After a nice lunch and tour of Barry’s native prairie field and canoe workshops, we drove to Charlie’s house so I could see where he lived, then on to Maggie’s house on Sorensen Lake northeast of Brainerd, where we had cake and toured their property. Although I could have stayed for hours talking about old times, we had to leave by 2 p.m., as we had a dinner engagement 120 miles southeast in Lindstrom, Minnesota, at the home of my nephew Austin. Dale and Pattie were joining us, as was Reid. We had a scenic drive around the west shore of huge Lake Mille Lacs and an hour later drove through the Sunrise River Unit of the Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area near Stacy, Minnesota, a place I often hunted and looked for hawk nests in my late teens and early 20s.  

Using our set of Google Maps for this leg of our trip, we managed to get lost for 20 minutes, due to the aforementioned issue of map names not matching road names and numbers. Upon my arrival, my nephew, a major in the Army teaching at the University of Minnesota, said, “who prints Google Maps?” Well, that would be me when my chief navigator, Lauri, is not at my side. We had a wonderful dinner of fried walleye and grilled chicken and a great visit with Austin, his wife Jes, and their young kids Harper, Remi, and Lincoln. Lincoln was coughing a lot, and they said he was getting over an infection. The kids had fun playing with Sarah and doing her hair in various barrettes.

At the end of dinner, I noticed a sharp edge to an upper molar, which I thought was strange. I thought I had a bone stuck in my teeth, but upon closer examination, discovered I had chipped the tooth. In an hour, my tongue was getting sore since a tongue cannot leave a mouth anomaly alone! When I got back to Dale and Pattie's house later that night, I got a small steel file from Dale and worked on the tooth to dull the tooth edge. Though crude, the file worked. (A trip to the dentist a few days later revealed that I had chipped a crown, it was still sound, and no work needed if it didn’t bother me. Self dentistry can work!).

Sarah and I were up early on Sunday. Game day! We decided to pick up Reid at 8 a.m. so we would have plenty of time to find parking, get to the stadium, and walk around the huge structure. We parked about a mile from the stadium and walked a few blocks to a tram platform where a tram would take us to the stadium. At the platform, a man was ranting and raving to himself about the ills of the world and the remedies needed. We could still hear his loud voice as we boarded the tram and headed away.  

At the stadium we had 40 minutes or so before the gates opened, so we looked for a paving stone placed in honor of my nephew Alex Hultman, who passed away in 2014 at age 21. We soon found Alex’s stone among the hundreds or perhaps thousands of other dedication stones near an artsy fake Viking ship with displays of football lore. 

At 10 a.m. (kick-off was at Noon CST), we went through security (quick and smooth) and then the ticket turnstiles. I was a bit nervous, since I only had tickets on my phone via the Ticketmaster app (another QR code for a 70-year-old!). I had put the tickets on my phone's “wallet” based on advice from Ticketmaster. It went smoothly as I retrieved each of the three tickets like a pro, or at least as good as a 14-year-old.

Once inside, we made our way quickly to the seating area, so we could get our first look at the field. I knew it would be a wow moment since I remembered a game I attended at the Metrodome in the early 1990s and what it was like to first see the field. It was indeed a wow moment! While standing there gawking for a few minutes, an elderly volunteer attendant came over and handed Sarah a big “First Game” button. He obviously could tell we were first-timers!

We walked around the stadium street-level concourse, scouted food places and watched the live KFAN radio broadcast of their pre-game show. Sarah was thrilled to be seeing what she considered famous people and said “two of them looked right at me!” We worked our way to the next level concourse and scouted more food vendors, deciding where each of us would order lunch.  

We next went up another level to find our seats near the very top, just under the roof line. It was a steep set of stairs, and I was huffing and puffing. Each seat had a program and a headband with a fake wig of Jared Allen’s signature mullet hair style. Allen, former Vikings defensive end and Hall of Fame nominee last year, was being inducted into the Vikings Ring of Honor at half-time. 

From our seats we watched the players warm-up, and Sarah was thrilled to see Justin Jefferson, Adam Thielen and others down below. As advertised, the view of the field, though far, was great. We went to get our lunches, then came back to our seats to eat and settle in for the kick-off. It was a great game, the noise was at times deafening, and we won 34 to 26!  With the loud music, Viking horn, frenetic announcing, Skol chants, fan waves, and overall boisterous crowd, I felt like I was at a rock concert with a football game happening on the side.

After the game, we opted to walk the mile to the parking ramp, since the weather was warm and sunny for late October. It was fun to see the 60,000 happy people fan out in all directions and fill the streets of Minneapolis. Once at the car, we drove back to Vadnais Heights to drop off Reid, then Sarah and I drove back to the airport, a bit nervous about getting through security and making our flight, since time was flying by. 

All went smoothly, although the rental car return took a bit longer than normal, and they did not give me a receipt, saying it would be emailed to me (it never was). The flight home was smooth and without delay. We watched Sunday Night Football on the free TVs embedded in every seat back, which made the flight pass quickly. In Hartford, a parking shuttle bus was at the curb, and we were back home about midnight. Sarah had school the next day, meaning a 5:30 wake-up.

I called Thrifty car rental on Monday and without too much hassle got a refund of the prepayment on the first reservation. Later that day or the next I checked my credit card account and discovered that Thrifty charged me double on the second rental agreement, saying I returned the car on Tuesday even though we left Sunday! Another call, another hassle to get a refund. I will not be renting from Thrifty again.

Two days later, Sarah, Reid and I came down with a nasty head and chest virus that lasted 10 days or more. Lauri followed soon after. Thanks Lincoln. 🙂 Sarah was the least sick, as she had just gotten over an infection before the trip. 

But despite the travel mishaps, seeing the Vikings in their new stadium and visiting family, old friends, and habitats of my youth made for a memorable and wonderful trip. It was a wild idea and exhausting, but provided an experience to remember and enjoy for years to come.