For Ex-Redskin, Game Means Super Business

Mark Moseley petered out as a place kicker for the Washington Redskins and finally retired last year, but he has made a nice segue into the travel business.

And business for Mark Moseley Travel was good Monday back in Washington. In one day, it booked 400 Redskins fans for travel next week to San Diego, and the agency plans to book nearly that many more before its allotment of airline tickets and hotel accommodations dry up, according to manager Eileen Fry.

This is the third Super Bowl for which Moseley has booked charters, and he’s getting the hang of it. His package includes a five-day, four-night stay in San Diego, arriving by chartered jet on Thursday and leaving the following Monday. With it comes hotel accommodations, transportation, daily breakfast, a Friday night private cocktail party and a Super Bowl brunch in Moseley’s corporate tent in the stadium parking lot.

Cost: $996, not including a ticket to the game. Most of his customers are Redskins season ticket holders whose names were selected in a lottery last week for Super Bowl tickets. But if you need one, Moseley will sell you an end-zone ticket for $750, one of several hundred tickets the agency is selling from a supply offered it by a ticket broker in Washington.

Packages offered by other travel agents to Washington fans, Fry said, range from $2,500, which includes four days at La Costa and a game ticket; to $1,800 for a four-day cruise from San Pedro to Ensenada on the S.S. Azure Seas with a stop-off in San Diego on Super Bowl Sunday and a ticket to the game; to $699, which includes two-nights’ stay at a hotel in Los Angeles and a shuttle bus to Mission Valley on Sunday morning.

A Sure Winner

Dave Crain, director of sales for Cush Acura and Cush Hyundai in Kearny Mesa (which is offering “Super Bowl Alternatives” such as passes to Sea World and San Diego harbor excursions to those people who take test drives), plans on selling his Super Bowl tickets.

He got them by virtue of the season tickets his family has to the Washington Redskins.

“I’m gonna sell them for $800 or $900 each and use the money to buy myself a 36-inch big-screen TV,” he said. “I’ll use my own restroom and drink my own beer and, when the game’s over, I’ll still have my TV.”

A Day for Sharing

Office building developer Sandor Shapery and his wife, Anne, wanted to throw a birthday party for their 1-year-old son, Sage, but they had a problem: Hardly any of their friends in La Jolla have children and, as Anne Shapery pondered, “What’s a birthday party without kids?”

So the couple invited 40 homeless youngsters from the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center to the party, staged Sunday afternoon at Avanti’s restaurant in La Jolla.

The kids arrived by chartered bus and indulged in hot dogs, hamburgers, chocolate cake, hot fudge sundaes and banana splits; they met Big Bird and rode on live llamas; they jumped on inflated air bags and created spin art and left with hundreds of dollars in party favors donated by La Jolla merchants.

“Those kids were so great! We’ve decided we’re going to do this every year for Sage’s birthday,” Anne Shapery said. “He’s going to learn early that giving is far greater than receiving.”

A Heartfelt Design

Community Hospital of Chula Vista opened a new, quarter-mile-long jogging track on Monday for use by patients in its cardiac rehabilitation program.

It’s an asphalt track, and presumably can be used for wheelchair races as well. But its primary purpose is to serve recovering heart patients “as a tangible reminder of the cardiac benefits of aerobic exercise,” said Toni Morris, coordinator of the cardiac rehabilitation program at the hospital.

Appropriately, the track is shaped like a heart--a Cupid-type Valentine heart versus a less-aesthetically pleasing but anatomically correct shape.

But in a sort of compromise for accuracy, the left--or venous--side of the heart will be landscaped with blue flowers; the right--or arterial--side will be done in red.

A Real Cakewalk

The city of Vista will celebrate its 25th birthday on Saturday with a citywide party at the Vista Boys Club.

And either a comma is missing in the press release, or there might be quite a spectacle. Events are said to include “dancing birthday cake, coffee, peanuts and lots of good old fashion fun.”

Amen to That

Finally, in our Weather Department, these items:

-Sunday’s storm hit in the midst of the 10 a.m. service at the First Unitarian Church of San Diego, with the power flickering on and off during the choir’s rendition of “My Lord, What a Morning.”

-And the power went out for good Sunday night at UC San Diego’s Warren Theatre--23 minutes into the 7 p.m. staging of Gardner McKay’s love story, “Sea Marks.”

So director Jim Carmody did what he had to do. He rounded up nine flashlights so he and the stage crew could light the stage, and the show went on. By show’s end, batteries on two flashlights had gone dead.

“But the audience loved the magic,” he said. “People for the 9:30 show didn’t want us to cancel the second show, but we felt we had to. Using flashlights is something you could only do once . . . for the audience to actually experience a blackout and for us to decide to finish the show anyway. That made them part of the event.”