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| This is the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods. This is where Joe got married. This is not where they filmed The Shining. |
Mid-October is a great time to be a sports fan. Conference schedules in college football are kicking into high gear, meaning you don't have to suffer through top-10 teams squaring off against West Eastern Metro Polytechnic Institute of Art. The middle of the NFL season means more divisional games, where teams start to separate themselves from the pack and you start to get a better idea of who the real contenders are. The baseball playoffs are in full swing, the NHL season is just getting underway, and the NBA season is right around the corner.
Meanwhile, mid-October is also the tail end of wedding season, especially in New England where people trek up north to see the foliage and do other outdoorsy things before the entire region is covered in a blanket of snow by Thanksgiving.
Joe's wedding this past weekend was held at the Mount Washington hotel at the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire. It looks like the hotel where The Shining was filmed, but that was in Oregon (it is, however, the location of the 1944 conference that established the gold standard throughout the world). Bretton Woods is fairly remote. As you drive north from Boston, about 90 minutes later you hit Concord, New Hampshire. As soon as you get north of Concord, it starts to resemble Siberia. Bretton Woods is another two hours north of that.
So how do you survive as a sports fan at a fall wedding in a remote location? Here are some do's and don'ts:
Do:
Suck it up and enjoy the weekend with your friends. It's a wedding for Christ's sake. If you can't survive three days without being able to walk away from a football game and enjoy the company of others, don't come to the wedding.
Do Not:
If you're coming in from out of town and enjoying the local ambiance, don't think that it allows you to pretend to be a fan of the local teams by osmosis. So when the Red Sox win the pennant on Saturday night, don't shriek and jump around and generally be more excited than you were during the actual ceremony. Especially when you're the only people watching the game, and especially when you aren't even Red Sox fans to begin with.
Do:
Accept the fact that the most athletic feat you're likely to see all weekend is the bride and groom being lifted in their chairs during the Hora.
Do Not:
Offer a member of the wait staff $50 to bring you score updates of relevant college football games every few minutes.
Do:
Use your damn smartphone and look up the score yourself.
Do Not:
Enter into an argument about the career accomplishments of LeBron James compared to those of Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and other NBA greats. While it may be the proper time (11:30 on a Saturday night after more than a few glasses of champagne), it is not the place.
Do:
Set yourself an alarm for early Sunday morning to remind yourself to set your Fantasy Football lineup. Otherwise you don't realize that both James Jones and Roddy White have both been ruled out of their Sunday matchups and Brandon Jacobs is questionable (and possibly doubtful) to play Monday night. There isn't anything going on at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning after a wedding that's more important than Fantasy Football. Unless you're the groom. And even then you can probably get away with it.
Do Not:
Wear a football jersey to a wedding. A football jersey is not formal wear.
Do:
Wear a tie representing your favorite team's colors. Better yet, wear a tie that, when looked at in a dimly-lit hotel bar at an after-party, can be seen as Black and Gold (Steelers'/Purdue colors), Green and Gold (Packers' colors), Purple and Gold (Lakers' colors), or Blue and Gold (Michigan colors), depending on who is looking at it. It seems that people see what they want to see.
Do Not:
Forget that a DVR is your friend, so plan accordingly. You can DVR a football game. You cannot DVR a weekend with your friends.
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