Waukesha Badgers Fan Prices UCLA Trip At $3,400, Calls It 'Surprisingly Manageable'

WAUKESHA — Terry Vrabec, a 44-year-old claims adjuster and 14-year Wisconsin football season-ticket holder, spent most of Tuesday evening at his kitchen table building a spreadsheet to determine whether flying to Los Angeles to watch the Badgers play UCLA on November 16 was a defensible use of money. By 10:40 p.m., he had his answer: $3,400, give or take the cost of a stadium parking shuttle he still hadn't priced out.

"That's eleven tabs," Vrabec said, turning his laptop around to show a spreadsheet titled "UCLA_TRIP_FINAL_v3." "Flights, hotel, ticket, rental car, meals, and then a tab just for contingencies, because I learned my lesson in Lincoln in 2019."

The breakdown, which Vrabec has already shared with four coworkers and his barber: round-trip flights out of Milwaukee at $1,200, three nights at a Rose Bowl-area hotel at $800, a single end-zone ticket purchased through the Big Ten ticket exchange at $850, a compact rental car at $350, and $200 budgeted for meals, which he described as "generous, assuming I don't do anything stupid at an In-N-Out."

A Civic, give or take

Vrabec arrived at the $3,400 figure around the same time his wife, Donna, pointed out that it was roughly the price of a 2014 Honda Civic with 90,000 miles on it, a comparison she'd looked up specifically to make. Vrabec said he appreciated the context but didn't find it persuasive.

"A Civic gets you to work. This gets you a Pac-12 matchup in person, in November, outdoors, which is a sentence I never thought I'd get to say about a Wisconsin road game."

— Terry Vrabec, season-ticket holder

Vrabec has attended ten Badgers road games since 2012, including trips to Lincoln, Minneapolis twice, and a 2017 Orange Bowl he still describes as "financially irresponsible but correct." He said the UCLA trip ranks as his most expensive non-bowl game by a margin of roughly $900, driven mostly by West Coast flight prices and what he called "predatory" Rose Bowl-adjacent hotel rates during a Bruins home weekend.

The contingency tab

The eleventh tab, labeled "Buffer," contains $180 Vrabec set aside for what he calls "Lincoln-style nonsense," a reference to a 2019 trip to Nebraska in which a gate agent informed him his carry-on exceeded size limits by what Vrabec maintains was "an inch, generously measured," resulting in a $65 checked-bag fee he has never fully emotionally recovered from.

Donna Vrabec, who is not attending the UCLA trip, said she has seen enough of these spreadsheets over the years to know better than to argue line items. Her only request, she said, was that Terry text her a photo from the stadium so she has proof the trip happened, following an incident after the 2017 Orange Bowl in which Terry's phone died before he took a single picture.

"I don't need receipts for the money. I need receipts for the trip."

— Donna Vrabec, Terry's wife

Packing list in progress

Vrabec said he's still finalizing what he'll wear to a late-afternoon kickoff in Pasadena, where the forecast currently sits around 74 degrees, a climate he has no cold-weather frame of reference for after fourteen years of November games played in temperatures he described as "character-building." He said he's leaning toward the same red Wisconsin windbreaker he's worn to every road game since 2015.

He added that he has not yet told his claims-adjuster supervisor he's taking the Friday before the game off, but plans to frame the request around "a family matter in California," which he noted is technically true if you consider the Badgers family.

Vrabec said the spreadsheet will get at least one more revision before he books anything, pending whether a coworker who floated splitting a hotel room actually follows through. "Right now it says $3,400," he said. "If Kowalski bails on the room, we're having a different conversation."