As I think I've mentioned a time or two, I have a deep and ardent love for sports. I grew up with baseball and football, but more recently, I've fallen in love with the Sounders, Seattle's soccer team. It makes sense; I love the rest of the world, the rest of the world loves soccer (football, futbol, il calcio, etc), therefore I should love soccer (okay, maybe that's not exactly how it works, but I'm going with it). And when I can combine my love of sports with my passion for travel, so much the better for me!
In 2012, the Sounders were part of a competition known as CONCACAF Champions League, where they play clubs from MLS, Central America and the Caribbean. There's always one home and one away game. That season, one of the teams they played was Caladonia AIA FC from Trinidad & Tobago. I had already taken a lot of time off that year to visit friends and family in Denver, Monterey and Boston, plus I was planning a trip to India so I wasn't sure I could find another week off to go to the Caribbean. But, of course, I did.
We flew into Port of Spain, Trinidad, the day before the match and checked into one of the sketchiest hostels I've ever stayed in. I'm not sure it was very clean, but it was cheap and we weren't staying for long. We wandered around the city, but not too far as Port of Spain has a reputation for being pretty unsafe. There were 10 of us total flying in for the match and we all met up at our hostel the day of the match to pre-funk. We had a cab come pick us up and with the rules of the road being what they are in T&T, we crammed all of us and our beers into the van and off we went to the stadium!
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| Our tifo. "The entire world will tremble at your might" |
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| At the players hotel, having a drink |
An hour later, we arrived and were shuttled through the back hallways to get our tickets and on to our seats. There was almost no one else there! We met up with a few other Sounders fans and combined I think we outnumbered the hometown crowd! We went about setting up our tifo display and taking pictures of our team warming up. The match was a lot of fun, we won, and apparently all you could hear on the TV was us singing for our boys. After the match, the players and coaches came over to shake our hands, thank us for coming and invited us back to their hotel for a round of drinks on them. How cool!
The next day was the 50th anniversary of Independence for Trinidad & Tobago; there had been fireworks every night leading up to this day. Red and black flags flew everywhere and it was quite the festive atmosphere. But we had a boat to catch to Tobago where the beach part of our vacation began! The ferry took about an hour and we were picked up at the dock by someone from our hotel (which was SO much nicer than the hostel on Trinidad!). It was right on the beach nestled in it's own little cove. I'm an early riser so every morning I'd get up and sit on the balcony, watching the waves and reading a book. We spent most of the time in the water, floating and lying on the beach. There was also a little waterfall not too far away that we walked to one day and two of our friends got engaged (with a lot of nudging from me and the other girl we were traveling with). We went on a fishing trip, saw dolphins and cooked up what we caught on a beach at the south end of the island. It truly was paradise.
This was my first international away trip to support the Sounders, and for the last few years they haven't been in CCL so we haven't been able to make these kinds of trips very often, but if they continue playing the way they have been this year, I see more away trips like this in my future. I'm hoping El Salvador. Or maybe Panama! Either way it will be a riot!
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