The other night while I was at the San Diego airport I noticed there were about a million Red Sox fans roaming the airport, waiting to go home. I was surprised that many fans showed up for the games this past week. However, I was even more surprised by something else...
I saw two more people wearing "Tenth Fan" shirts at the airport. The Padres 10th Fan shirt is somewhat of a mystery to Niki and I. Last June during the one Padres game against the Giants, they handed out free shirts at Petco Park that said "San Diego" on the front and on the back they said "Tenth Fan". The t-shirts were enormous and have since become the standard, all-purpose shirt you wear when you don't care if you look like a slob or a bumpkin.
That said - in retrospect, there must have been a million people at that single game because a year later, I still see people wearing the Tenth Fan shirt on a very regular basis.
So what does the "Tenth Fan" thing mean? I have no idea. Niki and I have debated it a number of times and are convinced that it was basically a bad play on the phrase "the tenth man." In fact, there's a whole forum post revolving around the
Tenth Fan shirts on the SignOnSanDiego site. You can see a picture of said shirt,
here.
At this point (below) I seriously began to think the pilots were going to fly us to Vancouver and then take a sharp left and head south, down the West Coast.
I swear to god, we flew over Canada for almost an hour before coming back through Wisconsin, heading over Minnesota and even the southeast corner of South Dakota! There's got to be some rhyme or reason to taking this route - I just don't know what it is. I'm not a pilot, but here's what I believe our route should have looked like (in yellow) vice the route we took (in red):
