Schedule day is always a big one for the Ultimate Sports Road Trip.

By now we know the routine… the NFL releases their schedule in mid April with big fanfare; ditto for the NHL, which usually is released right around the baseball All Star Break. The NBA comes out with theirs two weeks later, and then the AHL piggybacks on them. As for MLB, the teams each release their respective schedules in dribs and drabs… some teams announce the following year as soon as the regular season is over, while others (i.e. Mets, Yankees, Braves and Red Sox) are exasperatingly late in announcing.

As for NCAA college football… the big aggravation there is that many teams don’t release start times until 12 days before the games are played, and that makes it tough to plan, say, a Saturday college doubleheader, or calculating driving times.

Even now, we’re going to be in Bloomington. Indiana on Saturday, October 11 for the Indiana/Iowa football game, as a prelude to our visit at Lucas Oil Field the following day. What time is that game? Who knows! Why does it matter? Well, the Sabres season opener is Friday night October 10. If the kickoff in Bloomington is 12 noon, we have to hit the road Friday and will miss the hockey game. If it’s a night game, we can depart after the Sabres, catch some zzzz’s in Cleveland, and continue on Saturday.

Anyways, we got very little help in terms of “alignment of the planets” from the NHL schedule gods (a Sabres at Leafs game 12/6 in Toronto the night before the Bills/Dolphins game would have been awesome, for example).

These past few days, we sliced and diced the schedule, and since Artvoice gives us a small travel budget for us to cover road games, that certainly helps out, so we decided on these hockey games:

Thur 1/1 Buffalo at Toronto

Mon 1/19 Buffalo at Florida

Wed1/21 Buffalo at Tampa

Sat 2/28 Buffalo at New York Islanders

We’ve added a couple more OHL games (including the soon to be shuttered Windsor Arena, home of the Spitfires and former venue for the NHL Detroit Red Wings, we’re stopping there on Columbus Day/Canadian Thanksgiving as we make our way back from Indy). We also are filling out a roadie the second weekend of September, which may yet change depending on college football start times.

We’ve got the last weekend in October open as well, and right now we’re thinking AHL venues in the midwest which remain on our “to do” list. Or we might just stay home.

Here is the USRT schedule. Lotsa cool adventures await!

(By the way, we’ve also updated the roster of “new venues” on our web site. Construction is currently underway on seven new venues in the four major sports. Here is the lineup.)

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