Traditionally, the Fort at Gillette–where Magpie, I, and all the rest of the noisy gimmicky Rev fans stand–is marked by a 20 (or so) foot vinyl banner. For large scale road trips, where more than about 20 of us are at an away game, we’ll pack it up and take it with us. However, a small group of Fort (and other section) regulars are taking ad hoc road trips to more games, and nobody ever remembers to ask to get the Fort banner out of the stadium beforehand.
Enter the Roadtrip banner. 16’x3′ of cordura nylon drawn up into a smaller scale and lighter weight banner to be kept with one of our more frequent travelers for use on all road games. This thing sucked to work on, partly because the fabric required up to four coats of certain colors of paint, partly because the tension on my sewing machine went out before I finished the hem, and mostly because it wasn’t quite warm enough in New England to try to pull this stuff together outdoors. The first coat of paint went down before the last of the snow had melted, and every evening in a week I’d come home from the office only able to paint for about half an hour before it got too cold and windy to continue. I set the last of it together only hours before it was to be handed over for debut at the season opener in Chicago.
That lump in the middle is the grapevine from my neighbor’s yard pushing out over my day lilies, which are just starting to sprout.