Getting home: Hockey players travel scrambled by coronavirus

Getting home: Hockey players travel scrambled by coronavirus

SeattlePI.com

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Ryan Stanton would pull off the highway every few hours to give his pregnant wife, Kirsten, a chance to stretch her legs.

That’s usually when Kirsten and her mother-in-law would switch places to tend to the Stantons' 18-month-old daughter in the backseat of the pickup truck during a 27-hour drive from Southern California to St. Albert, Alberta. The trip came after the coronavirus pandemic put the American Hockey League season on hold last week.

“It’s something we’ll remember forever, that’s for sure,” said Stanton, an Ontario Reign defenseman.

Pulling a U-Haul trailer behind him, and with his dog Ralph squeezed into the cab, too, Stanton elected to drive home rather than risk his wife be exposed to COVID-19 by flying home from a crowded airport.

“It was a huge sense of relief,” the 30-year-old journeyman said of a trek that took him more than three days.

“I’ve always driven to where ever I’ve been, 40-hour trips," said Stanton who has played 120 NHL career games, the last with Washington in 2015-16. "But it’s a lot easier when you’re doing it by yourself and you don’t have to worry about feeding a year-and-a-half-old, and letting the wife get out and move around.”

Stanton was hardly alone among minor leaguers and college hockey players whose travels were disrupted by border closures and self-quarantine regulations.

NHL players, by comparison, had it much easier. Some chartered flights back to Europe, while Buffalo Sabres coach Ralph Krueger experienced no difficulty booking a flight through Chicago to his home in Switzerland.

Others weren’t so fortunate in what became a planes, trains and automobiles-type adventure.

And some still aren’t home yet.

Chicago-born defenseman Conor Allen was stranded this week in the Czech Republic after...

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