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.)

Oshawa’s General Motors Centre is a great new addition to their gritty but improving downtown

For part 2 of our Sunday roadie, we visited Oshawa for game 3 of the playoff series pitting the Niagara Ice Dogs and homestanding Oshawa Generals.

Oshawa’s got a brand new venue in General Motors Pla….errr..Centre. There was probably a time when Oshawa was a separate city that was kind of “out there” but no more, as Toronto’s white hot growth and sprawl has just about enveloped this community 30 miles or so to the east of Metro. Their downtown is a bit rough around the edges, but clean and things are looking on the upswing as far as renewal and development, with the new hockey venue a centerpiece of it all.

We would call the arena nice digs, your basic prototype, modern OHL venue with about six thou in seating and a single concourse above the seating bowl. A two level restaurant with panoramic views spans one entire side of the sidelines, with a press gondola perched above that. Another “Canadian Thing” is the mammoth signs on each wall of the seating bowl displaying the side of the street you’re on. Kind of cool actually.

The Gennies won 4-1 to take a 2 game to 1 lead in their best of 7 quarterfinals series, and as a result the fans got free fries from Mickey D’s (for four goals).

We have to mention the great Oshawa Sports Hall of Fame in the building, with much of the memorabilia donated by former players and members of the community. Lotsa cool stuff, we spent almost 45 minutes doing the tour.

We got reintroduced to poutine, good stuff but could have been put in the nuker for thirty more seconds to melt the cheese. The rest of the concessions fare offers the typical ballpark dreck, although the Pizza Pizza and the cheese steaks looked pretty decent.

This team is one of the flagship franchises in the OHL, with a long history and plenty of tradition. Lindros and Orr played here, team won seven OHL titles in the WWII years, and the banners for this and the four Memorial Cups that they’ve won all hang proudly.

Three years ago we got to see Sidney Crosby play with the Rimouski Oceanic when we did the roadie to Lewiston, ME, and we knew right then and there watching him play that Crosby was the real deal. The same can be said of future #1 NHL pick John Tavares of Oshawa; he does it all - kill penalties, hit, skate, always two steps ahead of everyone else. Tonight he had two assists in the win.

So that about covers our cool one day USRT to the North - a perfect sundrenched Sunday in Canada; some great baseball and intense hockey; checking out the sights of awesome Toronto. We wrapped up the ride home by stopping into a local Pizza Pizza in Oshawa and redeeming our ticket stubs from earlier in the day for a free slice, thanks to the Jays striking out 7 Bosox hitters.

That’s what we call the Toronto gastronomic trifecta - Shopsy’s dog, Poutine and Pizza Pizza. Ain’t life great!

The Oshawa Sports Hall of Fame and Museum is a MUST visit, located right off the main concourse

For a smaller arena, this place has a real “big league” feel and atmosphere