Seeing the Raiders play at home in Oakland has always been a big ambition for me, one of those ‘must be before you die’ things. I’d seen the Raiders play at Miami during superbowl season, but Oakland would be a completely different experience.
I’d got the pass out from the missus, which involved some major sacrifices, and had convinced a mate he wanted to gone on holiday to the US, and started looking into the logistics.
Started looking at flights, hotels and then the minefield that is buying tickets from outside the US. Then I made the wonderful discovery that is Sports Travel Tours, a small company that arranges just the type of trip I wanted.
Chatted budgets with the guy there, and he suggested that for my budget he could get me to back to back games. So it was to be, home games against the Texans and Bears, 10 days in San Francisco, plus flights, all for just over £900. Seemed well organised, got a little folder detailing everything about the trip, and some good advice for our stay in SF.
So off we go, and the day after our arrival first game vs the Texans. Had chatted to some folk on a forum, and the hope was to meet them at their tailgate. Got there and realised just how bad their directions were! So now we are at the football, 3 hours to KO with no beer
So needing to blag some beer, we made the decision that was to make our holiday. I approached some guys who virtually had a bar set up, to see if we could buy a beer, and from that moment they seemed to adopt us. Very very friendly and welcoming people.
After a set from ‘Raiderhead’, a heavy band that turn any song they can get hold of into a Raiders song, many beers, a few margarita’s and god knows how many tequila shots it was game time and to be honest, by the time we drunk beer through the game, the end of the game was a bit of a blur. This was probably a good thing as the Raiders were pretty damn poor – resulting in a crescendo of boos and requests to ‘Put Russell in’ from the fans.
First game over, and we now have a week to kill in San Fran. Various tourist / drinking based activities continue, and then on Wednesday we went to see the Warriors play the Mavs in the NBA. That was cool, and met a couple of guys there that convinced us to join them at the sell-out Cal versus USC college game.
This was an unexpected surprise, and was a great experience. They did warn us that you can’t drink in College stadiums, but didn’t warn us that we’d be meeting fans in a car park, to spend a few hours ‘Shotgunning’ beers before kick off
The other surprise was finding out just how much water your clothes can hold if you sit in the rain for 4 hours in a Californian stadium!
Next day we were back at Oakland, but this time knew exactly where we were headed, straight back to the ‘Black Hole Bar’ to hook up with our friends from the previous week. Again the hospitality was superb, great people. This time we were ready for it, and managed to stay sober enough to take in the game properly! The Bears game was tight and saw the Raiders go ahead 6-3 in the last qtr. But it all went wrong from there.
Other highlights for the week were taking in MNF in a downtown bar, cheap shopping, getting very drunk in Hooters and visiting Alcatraz – a must visit if you go to SF.
All in all a superb trip, and possibly the best holiday ever for me. Very glad that we discovered the Sports Travel Tours people. What made the trip was the people we met at the Raiders games, their warmth and generosity was endless.
Regrets? Well, looking back I’m afraid the Raiders were very poor for those 2 games, and it was a real shame that we didn’t get to see Russell get a few plays. In fact for the sporting events we attending we were 0 and 4
I will definitely be back in Oakland, it was fantastic. Just hope that next time I’m back JaMarcus might be leading us to big things...
