I’ve spent four of the last five days in arenas in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and that’s reflected in the lack of new content on Operation Gadget.
It’s amazing how little of this type of car travel I remember from when I was in college. In those days, I used to officiate games between Rome and Albany, New York along Interstate 90, and between Albany and Glens Falls, New York along Interstate 87. I would drive hundreds of miles a week because that was my way of earning enough money to pay my expenses at RPI not covered by financial aid and scholarships.
(For those of you who really know officiating, this was well before USA Hockey instituted the Junior Officiating Development Program and my mileage pales in comparison to the amount driven by those dedicated guys today.)
In one 24-hour period this weekend I drove from my home in Newtown, PA to Newark, DE via my wife’s office in Ambler, back to Newtown, then to Rahway, NJ, back to Newtown, to Aston, PA, and back to Newtown. That’s 361 miles according to Google Maps multi-point directions, and it should have taken me 8 hours of that 24 hour period.
When I started this article, I was going to say that I’ve become soft with respect to doing the traveling that you often have to do as a hockey official. But looking at the map, I see that anyone would have been taxed by driving those roads at the times I did.
Anyway, now you know why I’ve been so quiet lately.