Little Caesars Arena, Home of the Pistons

Have you found your vacation-length sweet spot?  When planning a big trip, I often find myself landing on 9-10 days.  Fly out Friday or Saturday, come home the following Sunday.  Leaving Montana is expensive no matter where you’re heading, so I always feel like that’s the best way to make it worth the money.  At this point we’d done a couple 10-day-ers, namely Mexico for our honeymoon and Boston and New York for our first big Red Sox Road Trip, and the signs were there that I had started playing with fire.  I love Joel and always love doing fun things with him but going from hopefully seeing him for a few hours at night during a work week to spending every moment with him in an unfamiliar city and, more importantly, unfamiliar bed, things tend to get a little dicey around day 9.  This is exacerbated by my obsessive need to plan every moment of the vacation and irrational anxiety around straying from said plan.  Mexico had ended with a less than fun sushi dinner, and Boston/New York ended with tears at the airport, albeit not from Joel or me.  Still, I probably should have known that a 10-day trip spanning 4 cities and 11 games (plus a bunch of other stuff) was too much.  But if my inner voice was trying to warn me, I didn’t listen and instead proudly handed Joel our jam-packed itinerary at the beginning of the trip without a thought of anything going any way but perfectly.
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To be completely honest, the trip was great.  We saw great games, great cities, and ate great food.  By Sunday, however, we were exhausted, missing our own bed and shower, and comparing every living creature to at least one of our dogs.  Add in the fact that the breakfast place I’d planned had a 2-hour wait by the time we got there so we had to adjust our schedule (blasphemy!) and the Raiders (Joel’s team) lost an absolute heartbreaker on Sunday Night Football, and you had all the ingredients for a crappy last day of vacation.  Still, though, we got to make our third trip to Little Caesar’s Arena and see how they dressed it up for the pre-Blake Griffin Pistons during Star Wars Night.

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