VT took a widebody plane to California. It looks like an Boeing 767-300, which is generally reserved for long international flights but also used for New York to LA and other premium cross-country flights. The Captains and OL were in the First Class Delta One pods, which are like little bedrooms with seats that can recline into a bed. I guess the DL probably flew in the business class. I've flown business class (free upgrade once), and those seats are big and comfortable. I have never flown Delta One, but those seats are luxurious. The OL and Captains should be well-rested.
Strictly business 😈#ThisIsHome pic.twitter.com/lM16h0XSJd— Virginia Tech Football (@HokiesFB) October 3, 2024
First class Livin' @bhayshul ✈️#ThisIsHome | #GoHome pic.twitter.com/mpdStpQkGE— Triumph NIL (@Triumph_NIL) October 3, 2024
Switchin' timezones 🛫#ThisIsHome | @flyROA pic.twitter.com/6kgY0ooebd— Virginia Tech Football (@HokiesFB) October 3, 2024
Wheels up to California. pic.twitter.com/GOpQdxIzTI— Derek Jones (@CoachdjCheetah) October 3, 2024
Comments
It is absolutely obnoxious that Virginia Tech and Stanford are in the same conference. Goddamn shame that the Pac12 died
This looks like some pretty luxurious travel for ~18 year olds, but yea I would like to see what it looks like for a non-rev sport.
We're bringing 100+ people across the country, might as well charter an entire plane. And once you have the whole plane, well someone has to sit up front. :)
I read an article yesterday, and in it - it was saying that the Miami equipment truck was about 1200 miles into their cross country drive... and it was about half way there. Just ridiculous that this is even happening
Yep- Miami to Berkeley about 3000 mi driving distance; Blacksburg to Stanford about 2650. The distances in the US ( out west particularly) are easy ton not realize 'til you drive it yourself or truly research.
For comparison, From Normandy to Berlin is about 725 miles which is just a few dozen miles more than DC to Chicago; just 1/3 of the distance to San Francisco.
From Paris to Tbilisi, Georgia is approximately 2650 miles and you would travel through 9 COUNTRIES(France, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia). The equivalent distance in the US would be from DC to LA and you would travel through 8 STATES(VA,TN,AR,OK,TX,NM,AZ AND CA).
From far Northern UK(Inverness Scotland) to far south Italy(Palermo, Sicily) is about 2300 miles; (roughly)equivalent to Charlotte NC to San Diego, CA.
Correct and that is why you should "proceed with caution" when someone says -insert small eurpoean country- is utopia with free healthcare and jobs for life. You can't compare that to the United States based on sheer size.
A pretty significant percentage of Europe would fit inside of Texas alone.
Europe is 14 times the size of Texas. 269,000 sq mi vs 3.9 million.
However the geographic size of the country of Germany is only 10% greater than the state of New Mexico!
Virginia is the 37th largest state in the US.at just a bit under 40,000 sq mi or about the same size or greater than the area of any of 5 European countries (Iceland, Hungary, Portugal Austria and Czech republic) .
Alaska is bigger than the combined total of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th largest countries in Europe(Ukraine France and Spain).
The countries of Austria and Czech republic are just over 30000 sq mi; San Bernadino COUNTY in CA is over 20,000 sq mi.
Fair point. I think the better way I've seen it displayed is that Texas is large enough to fit as many as ten European countries inside of it.
But if you want to get under a Texan's skin, add Alaska to the picture.
Edit: never mind, I didn't notice it was a TIC pic.
When I visited Alaska, one of the people I was with on the Dalton Highway trip up to Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean noted that there was a person/couple/group (can't remember anymore) from Texas on one of her trips. She gave the joke of:
What do you get when you double Texas?
The second biggest state.
Apparently, it didn't go over well.
I'm not sure why folks would get so bent out of shape over that joke.
Texas for the most part sucks. I feel like the over exaggerated love Texans have for the state is simply a coping mechanism to deal with the fact they live in Texas.
Nah, Texas is pretty good. Excellent economy, good food, for the most part nice people, the world's largest gas station with the new Buc-ee's now topping the TN Buc-ee's ... I mean what more can you want!?! I'm also being influenced by one of my brothers who lived there a long time and liked it as well as my wife who had an internship there are adored San Antonio. I've just visited and had several business trips.
Yeah, they can be a bit uppity at times. But nothing compared to the New York types I grew up with. My big issue, and why I would never want to live there, is I cannot stand hot weather.
Also, they are not full of scores of fake people (like, oh, so many in the northeast) that will say nice things and then stab you in the back. As my brother who spent many years in Texas says:
People in New York and New Jersey will stab you in the back. They don't do that in Texas. They'll just shoot you in the chest.
"The 5 states of Texas"
Like most states Texas has some awesome areas, and some absolute crap regions.
As a person who grew up in Houston, I can tell you with certainty that the reason people in Texas LOVE Texas is that they are straight up indoctrinated in the schools to believe everything about the state is great. Sam Houston, the Alamo, don't mess with Texas, everything is bigger in Texas, all of it. It's literal propaganda, but they do believe it.
If you stay in that Texas bubble you never bother to realize that it's actually not that important of a state.
What's funny is that most of that is true about any state.
But yeah, everything is bigger in Texas, including the propaganda.
I can tell you WV does not have a good propaganda machine, I mean they replaced "wild and wonderfully with "open for business". Also in college i tried to tell everyone I was from the north because history and no one would accept that.
Basically all WV has is a song incorrectly attributed to another state that everyone will belt out when drunk and like 85% will belt out when sober. That's all you get taught.
It's the exception that proves the rule.
But what I was referring to is that like any other state, West Virginia has some awesome areas and some crap areas. Most of the awesome areas are wilderness or ski areas, and I've enjoyed the white water rafting.
Yeah, replacing "Wild and Wonderful" is up there with replacing VT's logo on the academic side - stupid and ill-advised, but I suppose they were trying to attract something they were desperate for (jobs) when politicians were promising to replace coal-mining jobs with technology jobs, and we see how that all worked out.
If it were up to me, we'd play WVU in football every year.
My wife is from West Virginia and pretty much no one in her family lives there anymore. Her dad and one of her 7 siblings are still in Charleston, the rest are mostly in Colorado or North Carolina.
The funniest thing to me has and always will be the fact that the "Don't Mess With Texas" slogan comes from an anti-littering campaign. Especially, when I run across someone with a tattoo of the slogan. Like, yeah man, I hate littering, too.
Edit: Meant to reply to stevetheking.
You have to admit, that's pretty catchy for an anti-littering campaign.
Absolutely. I just laugh my ass off when people use it to act tough.
Exactly! Even more so when folks talk about transportation issues.
edit- this was meant to be reply to DC above
The real shame is that Phillips and the rest of the inept ACC leadership added PAC teams to the conference. I know, I know, this was covered in much detail and venom at the time.
I guess I still have not made peace with it.
At the time it came across as ill advised, reactionary, and quite frankly desperate on the part of the ACC and the conference presidents who voted for it. Now that we are seeing (and feeling) the actual effect of it, imo it can be summed up simply as:
I flew from charlotte to SF today with Mike Burnop, Andy Bitter, and David Cunningham on the plane. It was an airbus A321. Definitely not as luxurious as this
Uniforms announced.
With the play button strategically placed and no pants visible, I thought he was supposed to be on the toilet at first.
Call me old, but this new trend of wearing pants that terminate above the knee is just stupid. Football in shorts? What happened to the knee pads?
Very stupid. The asshole linebacker Wilson from NC State wore shorts last year- literally. Funny how he doesn't do that in the NFL now?
What makes him an asshole? Other than how he dominated us.
Wearing shorts while playing linebacker in a football game.
Well, they're HIS knees.
I was shocked by this at first, but I guess for some reason it's not against the rules.
I'm not nearly as big as these guys, but I'm tall enough that an upgrade makes a world of difference on a long flight.
Never been in one of those pods myself, but I imagine they are wonderful lol.
The pods are amazing. I've never been in delta's pods but I can't imagine them being any less amazing that united's and those were just as good as Lufthansa
I'm glad they're treating the team as well as possible on these cross-country flights.
Go Hokies.
After a recent and pretty negatory experience of flights to and from Europe in coach, I am loathe to ever fly more than a hop or two again. I used to love flying, but admit that the crowded airports and sardine packaging in coach left me exhausted and hating the whole affair.
Glad the players get a different experience, but we absolutely should not have to do this year in and year out. The ACC is nuts.
I feel bad for Cal and Stanford. They gotta be flying all over the place for pretty much any game they play, regardless of the sport.
Boo fucking hoo for UCLA. It was their bolting to the Big How Many Now? that caused this. They can go kick rocks for all eternity.
How many of those miles for FSU and GT were agreeing to play in frigging Ireland!
Is that one way travel only? Hokies roundtrip to Stanford would be over 5500 miles air/road combined.
I'm honestly not sure, I've seen the travel milage reported a half dozen different ways. I feel like this is also ignoring Hawaii.
i wonder if each player gets to count this against their personal frequent flyer program.
Wait until basketball season. These will be rookie numbers.
Have flown delta one a few times (my proudest point redemption ever was 99k skymiles for ATL->HK on delta one) . Pretty good for a US airline. Doesn't touch the premium offerings on Emirates/Lufthansa/Singapore.
But going back to football... this is a good move by pry & co. And a shit move by the ACC.
that is a long flight. Probably worth draining your skymiles for that comfort.
Yea... there was actually a volcanic explosion in Russia so we had to reroute after we were in the air, so we landed in Tokyo to refuel... TLDR almost 18 hours on a plane.
But getting a $10k+ ticket for 99k skymiles (the equivalent of about $990) was a tremendous deal. That was in my traveling consultant days when I had status and hundreds of thousands of points and whatnot
Ah travelling consultants. I can remember when a WTP was having issues with vibration on a huge pump. The Contractor hired a consultant to resolve the issue. The guy arrived, listened to the pump operating and opened a folder holding different sized shims. He pulled one out, told the contractor to install "this" shim under "that" bolt and handed him a bill for $10,000. The contractor said, I have to have this itemized better. He wrote on the invoice, shim - $1, knowing where to put it - $9,999. But dang if it didn't solve the problem.
Yea, I was a software consultant lol
Yeah, I did Baltimore to Tokyo a couple times. I am glad I was young as I had to do that in coach.
"Yeah, I did Baltimore to Tokyo a couple times."
Oh God, that sounds brutal. If you ever get a chance, read Dave Barry Does Japan. Or at least the introduction to the book. The body of the book itself is okay. Some humorous moments, but nothing special. But the introduction describing his initial thoughts about Japan as well as the time it takes to go from Florida to Japan are a hilarious.
In terms of horrible travel though, my girlfriend in grad school went back to India to do part of her research. Her trip was something like New Haven to New York or Newark, then to somewhere on the west coast. Then to someplace other than the final destination Calcutta and then taking the train from wherever she landed in Asia to Calcutta. Took something like 2 days. Must have been much cheaper to do that as she is on a graduate student budget, but lord that would be a nightmare trip.
I just got back from the direct flight from Tokyo to Dulles
It wasn't as bad as you'd think, though admittedly I'm on the shorter legged side. And yes, we flew economy
Side note, Japan was fantastic and the people are kind and actively helpful.
Like Dave Barry, did not know of that title. Sounds like I'm getting on that soonest.
This sounds like the Saving Private Ryan Effect. For those unfamiliar, all the actors had to go through boot camp with the exception of Matt Damon who then the cast developed a natural resentment towards to fit the theme of the movie.
We rest the OL so they can do their job Saturday whilst having the defense resent the OLs luxury accommodations so they can take that frustration out on Stanford's OL.
Flip the roles on the way home to reward (what I hope is) a good defense performance.
Did the same for Band of Brothers, they had Capt Sobel's actor not go through boot camp then they filmed the scene where he did the personnel inspection and took away everyone's weekend pass. Actor's said it worked perfectly. You can feel how they hated him.
I figured it was just cuz it was Ross and they agreed they weren't on a break.
#A. I love you guys. You're my people
#B. I also assumed it was because it was Ross and his face is so damn punchable.
For the folks coming out here... It is HOT. This game is going to be blazing. I hope the kids are rested and hydrated
Looks like about the same weather as the Vandy game was(mid to upper 80s with maybe a tad less humidity. Hope they are better hydrated this time...
They had an IG clip yesterday showing Tuten giving a tour of his pod on the plane lol. They had provided pillows, blankets, a small tv and then he had brought along his PSP and some Chick-fil-A. Looked like a nice setup!
Here it is: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DArRsOTPS9j/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&...
So who got the great seats on the ride home? Haven't seen anything on the very happy return flight.