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WHL: Ice take the ultimate long route to make it to Regina
Twenty-six hours is enough time to watch every Simpsons episode consecutively. It's enough time to cook 520 three-minute eggs. It's more than enough time to watch all six Star Wars movies twice. For the Kootenay Ice, it's the amount of time it took them to reach Regina for their game on Wednesday night.
Remind teams in southern Ontario they may never, ever kvetch about life on the road? Extended bus trips through dodgy weather is a bigger fact of life in the Western Hockey League, as the Ice's odyssey this week shows. Under ideal winter driving conditions, it would take the Ice about 10 hours to get from Cranbrook, B.C., to Regina for a game. However, on Monday, they found the highway they normally take closed due to Hoth-like conditions. Once they realized there was no waiting this storm out, the Regina Leader-Post's Greg Harder reported, "the Ice had no choice but to backtrack to Cranbrook and take a longer northern route via the Trans-Canada Highway."
All told, it added up to a roughly 26-hour trip. The Ice ended up arriving in Regina at around 3 a.m. local time for their game with the Pats, which means it will be a hell of story if they shake off the bus legs and win. From Gregg Drinnan:
The Ice got to Sparwood and discovered that No. 3 Highway through Crowsnest Pass was closed due to snow and blowing snow.
With no indication as to when it would re-open, the Ice sat in a Sparwood parking lot for about 11 hours.
Still with no idea when the highway would re-open — in fact, there was talk that it might remain closed for another 24 hours — the Ice had breakfast and then chose to return to Cranbrook.
"We have back-tracked to Cranbrook," reported goalie Mackenzie Skapski, "and are taking the Invermere route through Banff and then through Calgary. So, all-in-all, at the end of the day it'll probably be a 15-hour bus ride."
At one point, [Skapski] noted that the movie selection on the bus was "very good. . . . It was almost [as though this was] meant to be."
... The Ice arrived in Regina about 3 a.m. CT. When they arrived in the Saskatchewan capital, No. 3 highway still was closed at Sparwood. (Taking Note)
It's a credit to the Ice that after all that, they are going to play the game. As the lone British Columbia team in the Eastern Conference, this hardly an alien experience to them. The club did have a game postponed when it was on a Saskatchewan road trip recently. Ironically, though, as coach Kris Knoblauch pointed out, that wasn't because they had trouble getting out of their own province.
"After what we've gone through, it'll feel long," head coach Kris Knoblauch said from the bus. "It's funny, all the games that I've been with Kootenay, we only had one cancelled and that was when we were on a road trip in Saskatchewan (two seasons ago). We played in Prince Albert and the highway closed from Saskatoon to Regina. We had to postpone that game. Now we're coming from B.C. and we're in the same situation but we should be able to play (tonight)." (Regina Leader-Post)
Understandably, like the pros, junior leagues do have a show-must-go-on attitude, within reason. One wonders how much the amount of time spent on the bus will catch up to the Ice by Saturday, when they finish a 3-in-4-nights stretch in Brandon.
Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.
