Our newest souvenir

So we all went over to the team hotel, and met up with Michael Kammarman, who is the team's press officer. We had lunch and were getting ready to leave when we saw him again in the lobby. He said "where are you going now?" and I said "we'll be heading back to our hotel. We don't want to bug the players before the game." He said "well, don't leave just yet, I need to run upstairs and grab something."

While we were waiting, Landon Donovan walked by and we said hello. He thanked us for coming. Then Frankie Hejduk came out of the elevator, and we said hello to him. Mentioned to him that we were celebrating our 20th anniversary, and he said "wow, that's great. Wait a second, let me go grab you a shirt."

In the meantime, Michael, a cameraman and a videographer came out of the elevator. I saw Michael give something to Frankie, who then came over to Jan and me and handed us a jersey that was folded up in a plastic bag. I saw number 20 on it, and thought, "wait, is that McBride's number? Who wears 20 now?"

Then I opened it up, turned it around and saw that "LASTORT" was on the back. The #20 was for the 20 years that we've been married. I got pretty choked up (yeah, I'm an emotional guy) and Michael interviewed us. I figure they'll probably have something up on the US Soccer web site later today or tomorrow.

That was pretty awesome.


Oh, and as an aside - a guy in the lobby was offering round trip transport from the hotel to the stadium - for FIFTY bucks each! Hell, you can take a taxi all the way from the airport to this hotel for $25.00 total for all four of us, and that includes all our luggage! So, yeah, don't think we're going for the $50 round trip deal.