NHL Road Trip 2010-11

The NHL released its schedule for the 2010-11 season yesterday and as usual, I've put together a possible road trip. I didn't spend much time on it but it works out fairly nicely, with exactly 3 months on the road. No visiting team is seen more than twice and there's no difficult drives on game days. I won't be making this trip, but it's always nice to think about.

Here's the schedule:

October 23  Montreal at Ottawa
October 25  Phoenix at Montreal
October 28  Toronto at Boston
October 29  Montreal at NY Islanders
November 1  Chicago at NY Rangers
November 4  NY Rangers at Philadelphia
November 5  NY Rangers at New Jersey
November 7  Philadelphia at Washington
November 9  Edmonton at Carolina
November 13 Pittsburgh at Atlanta
November 14 Minnesota at Tampa Bay
November 22 Pittsburgh at Florida
November 24 St. Louis at Nashville
November 27 Dallas at St. Louis
December 2  Washington at Dallas
December 4  Florida at Phoenix
December 9  Calgary at Los Angeles
December 10 Calgary at Anaheim
December 11 Chicago at San Jose
December 18 Toronto at Vancouver
December 27 Buffalo at Calgary
December 30 Colorado at Edmonton
January 2   Vancouver at Colorado
January 9   Dallas at Minnesota
January 12  Colorado at Chicago
January 14  Detroit at Columbus
January 15  Columbus at Detroit
January 18  Detroit at Pittsburgh
January 21  NY Islanders at Buffalo
January 22  Washington at Toronto

If you look closely, you'll see there's a long break in Vancouver; this is there so the Maple Leafs vs Canucks game can be included. A real trip would probably not waste so much time in one place.

Of course, there are many other possible trips; I always start these plans in Ottawa and finish in Toronto but you can obviously start and finish anywhere. The Winter Classic in Pittsburgh and the Heritage Classic in Calgary are games that you could build a trip around. If you are planning to see all 30 hockey rinks, you can expect to drive over 12,000 highway miles, about 200 hours over the trip. That's a lot of time for just 30 hours of hockey watching, but I hope I can do it sometime.

Best,

Sean