After last week's fairly heavy newsletter, I decided to drop a travelogue today. It’s about our December trip to Northern England. If you like this kinda stuff check our travel blog: BowlingsAbroad. 

Don’t worry, Takes & Typos will be back to regularly scheduled programming next week. Assuming things in Minnesota will not be resolved by then, I’ll share some of the replies from readers to last week's newsletter. 

One more piece of admin, I saw several new subs from former students this week. Some from my early days at Lincoln. Jeez, you guys are like thirty-somethings now. Feel free to throw me an email and tell me how life’s treating you.

Onto the show.

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The flight from Abu Dhabi to Seattle is 17 hours including a 90-minute layover in Doha. 

The flight from Dubai to Seattle is 15½  hours direct, but requires a 2-hour taxi ride north to Dubai. 

Since arriving here in the Gulf in 2019, I have made one of those trips a total of 15 times, thirty if you count the return legs. Habibi, there's only so many 17-hour travel days a man can take. 

Because of that math, Hope and I decided we need to break up that trip whenever possible. Last winter we decided to fly through Manchester and spend a few nights in Northern England. We visited Anfield, the home of Liverpool Football Club. We also went to a match at historic Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday, and we went to a Pantomime (or Panto for short) which is a distinctly British holiday play, common up and down the island. We enjoyed that trip so much that we decided to make it our thing and we ran it back this year. 

Our trip to England began with a missed flight and ended with the flu, but everything in between was bangers.

I usually handle the bookings for House Bowling when we travel. Last year, though, Hope took the lead and booked a delightful boutique hotel near Manchester Piccadilly. It sat on top of a pub. The rooms were dated but cozy, and we loved it. 

While wandering the neighborhood on that trip, I noticed a nearby Hyatt and started doing some quiet mental math about whether we could swing it with credit card points the following year. I filed that away for later.

A Missed Flight and the Wrong Hotel

Our flight out of Seattle departed late, which meant we missed our connection from Paris to Manchester. We were rebooked quickly enough, but the damage was done: a planned rest day disappeared, replaced by a nine-hour walkabout in a terminal without lounge access. We briefly toyed with the idea of heading into the city. After all, who turns down even a few hours in Paris? But our winter clothes were buried in checked luggage, and common sense won out.

Womp, womp.

The follies continued when we arrived near midnight at the hotel in Manchester. It quickly became apparent I had not booked the Hyatt property that I thought I had. The hotel that I envisioned had been sold by the brand and I booked at a different Hyatt in a totally different neighborhood. Hope put on an understanding game face but I know inside she was like “this fool….” 

Exhausted, we stood for a moment at the window, staring out at the barren nighttime landscape before giving up and crawling straight into bed. By morning, we set out on our first walk through the neighborhood and were pleasantly surprised. What had looked empty the night before turned out to be anything but. We were staying across the street from Manchester University, dark only because the campus was closed for winter break. The neighborhood around it, however, was very much alive.

This ended up being a huge dub. Because of the university, the area was packed with cheap restaurants, a co-op grocer, plenty of cafés, and lively bars. Our first meal after arriving was shawarma, which immediately set the tone, and the second was a straight banger at a dim sum joint. As a bonus, the hotel was only a ten-minute walk from Manchester Oxford Road station, actually closer to the rail than the hotel I’d originally planned to book.

From there, right up until the flu hit me, the trip went off without a hitch. 

On the 29th, we took Northern Rail from Manchester Oxford Road to Sheffield. It was cold but clear when we arrived, the air sharp enough to wake you up, and Wednesday were hosting Blackburn. 

Years of shambolic ownership by Dejphon Chansari has left the club in administration (what the Brits call bankruptcy), docked twelve points in the league, and stripped of much of its talent after players requested transfers just to get out of the mess. 

The match itself finished nil to nil. Rain broke out around halftime but didn’t linger. Under normal circumstances a scoreless draw would feel forgettable, but with Wednesday dead last and still clawing back from a negative points total, even a clean sheet felt like a small, stubborn victory (see the highlights below).

On New Year's Eve we went to the Panto. Last year it was a production of Cinderella featuring an amazing performance from a massive drag queen as the evil stepmother. When I explained this with wonder in my eyes to an English friend he explained “Mate, there’s always a Queen.” 

This time around it was a production of Robin Hood that we thought was absolutely hilarious. It was fun being back a second time and seeing some of the repeated gags the performance troop carries over year to year. 

On New Year’s Day our last major mission was another train ride, this time a bit longer, to the city of Derby, where we met up with our friend, Callum. 

Callum is an amazing cat. He works as a teaching assistant with special needs children in an English public school. He’s that classic story of a friend of a friend who became a friend. He’s kind and empathetic, and ladies, he is single! He hosted us for lunch at his house (he made a great, flavorful curry), and then we headed to Pride Park to watch Derby County, another one of the oldest teams in England, take on Middlesbrough in the Championship. 

The stadium was packed and deafening. Boro dominated possession in the first half and the away end was loud as hell, but a mix of wasteful chances and genuinely comedic finishing kept them scoreless. The second half evened out, and Derby finally broke through in the 70th minute when Bobby Clark tucked home the winner, igniting the home crowd. As the noise swung in Derby’s favor, the Boro supporters responded with a chant of “you only sing when you’re winning,” which made me chuckle more than it probably should have (again, highlights below).

But that morning is when the aforementioned flu really kicked in. 

I woke up feeling like crap. All the DayQuil in the world wasn’t rescuing me from this. While we were at Callum’s house, I retired to his couch for a brief nap because I felt so tired. During our pregame, I limited myself to a single pint because I felt poorly. During the match, I was straight-up freezing. I clearly am not built for winter in the Midlands. By the time we boarded the train, it was a full-blown crisis. My body was just doing crazy stuff. I alternated between sweating and shivering and woke up the next morning feeling like death. 

I ended up contracting the worst flu I've had in my life and spent about 12 days feeling as physically miserable as I've ever felt. I’m thankful this flu hit me in England, rather than back home. Lord knows what this could have done to my mom, if I got her sick. I spent the entire flight back to Dubai taking my mask off to blow my nose into tissue after tissue and then slapping it back on. 

I had no appetite and also was stricken with a bout of [redacted]. After I finally started feeling human again, one of the higher ups at my school, a lovely Canadian woman, pulled me to the side and said I “looked great” and asked “have you been working out?” I belly laughed and said “no [redacted], I've had the flu and it kicked my butt.”

I’m really thankful that I’ve been put in a geographical and financial situation where trips like this are possible. I’m also thankful that I have a patient wife who indulges my passion for the Beautiful Game. And for the record, this trip extends the undefeated streak for English football teams I’m rooting for in matches I attend in person.

Those teams are now five wins, zero losses, and one draw.

I can’t wait to go back next winter.