BW Blog

The Battle Wagon just returned from its maiden voyage to Arrowhead Stadium. Due to the distance of the trip we decided to tow it down instead of attempting to drive it 450 miles. We left the Twin Cities right on schedule at about 12:30 AM Friday morning, and after stopping in Clear Lake, Iowa for the night, made it into Kansas City late Friday afternoon.

Friday night we assigned ourselves a recon mission to the Westport entertainment district ahead of Saturday nights scheduled pub crawl. We ended up closing down Kelly’s a 3AM then walking the mile or so back to our hotel.

Saturday involved sleeping in and watching some college football before joining the pub crawl at the Dark Horse at 8 o’clock. There were probably 40 or 50 Vikings fans on the crawl plus we saw many others just out for the night, so there was significant purple in Kansas City on Saturday night.

The group began spreading out a bit around 1AM, with some people staying at Harpo’s, some continuing on to Kelly’s and a few light weights heading back to their hotels. With last call at 2:30, most were back to their rooms by 3 or 3:30.

We were up at about 6:30 on Sunday morning and read to head for the stadium at about 7:15. For reasons I can’t quite figure out, they don’t open the stadium parking lot until 8:30. Traffic backs up on all the roads around the stadium as fan just park in the street and wait for the gates to open. Once the gates open, people park everywhere: in the lot, on the grass, in the median, where ever. It’s kind of a strange dichotomy - No one can come in until exactly 3 and one half hours before game time, but once you’re in, anything goes.

We made it in just after 8:30 and were ready to tailgate shortly there after. It didn’t take long for the other Vikings fans to find us, and soon we had enough purple to make it look almost like a home game. Several Chiefs fans stopped by to check out the Battle Wagon. Most were polite and understandably impressed. The weather was hot, with temps forecast to reach the 90’s. Of course that made for a target-rich tattoo environment. Several tattoos were applied, a few on Chiefs fans.

Over all, it was a decent trip. Check out the photos here.