Week 1 - DrAtomic's Travel Story

Z'Doc on the road...

By: DrAtomic
Pictures: DrAtomic
As always: clicking on the thumbnails will open a larger version.

For the Trench Crew game report, head here.

Friday
Since Z'Doc was getting all shaky and sweaty from lack of Football (the proper one) he decided to pack up and hit the road again. It was time for The season opener against Rhein Fire in Dusseldorf!!!

The four of us, jumped in the car and headed for Dusseldorf on Friday night where we had booked two rooms through fire-planet in the Rennesaince Hotel which is a 5 star Marriot affiliate (you know the one the organises the Superbowl party in Amsterdam each year). This worked out great, just 31 Euro a person, with more personell then guests. Many many thanks to the fire-planet for such a great bargain!! We arrived at the Hotel at about 0:10 AM after doing way to much sight seeing in the dark (damn we're lousy at finding our way around foreign cities). We'd been cruising around Dusseldorf only to find that we passed the Hotel on our way in to Dusseldorf and drove past it for another 2 times. The directions of the Marriot Hotel didn't help much either, i.e. go North for 500 feet, take a left driving South/East for 150 feet... sigh... We dumped our bags in the rooms and headed for the bar to party away the frustration. We ordered Schlosser Alt (Oud Slootwater) which is one of the sponsors of Rhein Fire and local brews of Dusseldorf. 5 Star bar service, drink gone, fresh one on it's way, hehehe. After about 2 hours we crashed.

Saterday
Phew, barely made breakfast (ok ok lunch), with pounding heads. Now I know why my mother used to tell me never to drink 'Slootwater', especially when it's old. We spend the rest of the day exploring the 'Alt Stadt' with our girl friends. Good atmosphere downtown Dusseldorf. Well worth the sight. Bought some cigars in an authentic cigar shop so that we could properly celebrate victory... At about 16:30 we took a cab to the Rhein Stadion, finally party time!!!

Pre-Game Party
Wow, is this a big pre-game party or what, it's about 3 to 4 times the size of ours! I especially liked the fact that they have a grass ground to go with it. Which is havely used for throwing some balls, but there was also a flag football game going on between Rhein Fire fans and Admirals fans (calling themselves the Phantoms), unfortunatly they weren't doing to well. I don't know what the final score, they might have recovered, I saw them make at least one Touchdown... As rain was threatening to come in we decided to go and take our seats. Were we where pleasantly surprised by quite a number of fellow privateers of the Admirals (ar, ar, ar). I total there must have been somewhere between 400 and 1000 of us all through out the Stadium, too bad we seemed to be split over about 4 sections.

Pre-Game Show
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, what an amazing pre-game show, if I would add up all the Admirals pre-game shows it still wouldn't sum up to this one, the thing that made it rock even more was the fact that our Cheerleaders were part of it as well. The fireworks were just awesome, they had big balls of fire pots shooting flames of about 20 meters high up in the air and had guys with flame throwers introducing players. You could feel the heat of the flames in the stands. Absolutly fantastic, but also intimidating. There was much more but this part was just utterly cool.

Half-time Show
Although it was some sort of strange Carnaval like show with even a German version of the 'Jantjes', the show itself was well worth it.

Game-Time
Yeaaaaaaah, first toss of the season and we won it..... yeaaaaaaaah, first play of the season, yea..$%%#@@$**#911#$*@%whatthe^%$#@$@@ we fumbled the ball away on first play, first down on our own 20.... and Fire thanked the Ads by taking two plays for a TD... sigh.... It turned out to be a very good game after all where the Admirals looked impressive on their Offense and solid on defense and special teams and looked like they were in control and off to beating Fire. But we lost the ball a couple of more times and the game ended the way it was started, although this time we fumbled while in scoring position. While this all may sound very awfull, it wasn't, the Admirals were looking really good but should have converted. I'll leave the details to Ross who is far more knowledgable then me in this sort of stuff. I just saw a good, exciting game and saw a completly different Admirals then the past couple of years and had a great time.

Sunday
Pressed the gas deeeeeeeeeeep and got home in a record of just 2 hours.

Away games just have a special thing to it, so we couldn't resist and just confirmed our flights to Barcelona!!!

-DrAtomic (who is very curious as to how our team will react to the immense wall of sound we produce at home, which reminds me; Spergon Wynn was quoted on NFL Europe.com as not being affraid of the hell of Dusseldorf, but I reckon that he has changed his mind (E-Plus handed out free whistles to the Fire supporters and I saw him trying and failing to hear Bart Andrus on DSF more then once). He'll be in for a surprise this saterday :o)

For the Trench Crew game report, head here,


Week 1 pictures
(TonV to blame for the comments)

Now that is a cool truck. Why canīt we get toys like that?
Orange is really the only possible choice for a Dutch team.

Someone put a real pyromaniac (and I donīt mean one of the girls!) in charge of the on field entertainment....
Yes guys, we all know you are the Rhein Fire

All in all, the pregame show was pretty good.
The Fire getting on the field.

Weeee! That looks like fun. Can I have one of those please?

Really quite impressive the fireworks

.
Guess they forgot to pay their gas bill though. Letīs hope we can smother their 'Fire' when they come to Amsterdam for the rematch!