A Day at The 'Shoe

In case you didn't know, The 'Shoe is a name for Ohio Stadium where the Ohio State football team plays, because it's shaped like a horseshoe. And that's where I spent most of my day yesterday.

I don't have too many blog-friends from Ohio. A lot of you are from the south, and I've read a lot about the SEC in the past few weeks. Well, I'm here to represent the Big 10 today, and more specifically, The Ohio State University! We have crazy fans too, with a lot of heart!

Yesterday we met Luke's family at Bob Evans for breakfast to surprise his dad. The Ohio State tickets for that day were his birthday present, and he was totally surprised! We left straight from Bob Evans and drove all the way to Columbus.

The first thing you see when you get there is a sea of tailgaters. These people made me realize that there really ARE crazier Ohio State fans than my husband (We have our own Ohio State themed room in our house). They bring their campers, buses, vans, or whatever else at 6:00 in the morning. Most of their vehicles are completely decked out in Ohio State painting and gear. When we walked through at about 11:30, we could already smell the delicious smells of tailgate food. People were playing cornhole and throwing footballs and sitting in lawn chairs watching their big screen TVs out in the parking lot. It looked like such a fun time! A lot of them stay all day and all night and leave the next morning. I would LOVE to go down and do this a few times a year! Maybe someday we will :-) Anyway, here are some pictures of some of the hardcore fan tailgate vehicles:After walking through all of that and dreaming about our future tailgating adventures (and I really hope we have some!) we walked around campus a little bit, and then headed to the Skull Session. The Skull Session is basically a big pep rally before the game. It's held in the old basketball arena. A high school band is always asked to come and play, and then The Ohio State Marching Band comes in and plays their pre-game and half-time shows. Sometime during all of that, Coach Tressel comes in and gives a littl speech-ette and the team walks through. It just gets everyone really pumped up about the game! And I really like this part almost as much as the game itself, because I LOVE the band. They are probably the most amazing marching band ever.

On the way, Luke and I got our picture taken with Brutus Buckeye:

Here we are inside St. John's arena for the Skull Session
And here are Luke's mom and dad
Here they come! TBDBITL (10 pts if you're not from Ohio and you know what that stands for!)
And here was the i-dotter for the day: (during script Ohio, he's the guy that gets to run out and dot the eye. And then he bows down like this:)

After we got pumped up at the skull session, we headed to The Shoe. There were just droves of people EVERYWHERE, and they were all wearing scarlet and gray.
Aerial View
About to enter the beautiful stadium
Finally in the stadium! By the time the game started, just about every single one of those seats were filled. Over 105,000 fans!!

The team takes the field:
And then it was time for pregame
Drum major always does a backbend and touches the plume of his hat to the field. Everyone goes wild at this moment!
The infamous script Ohio (backwards and kind of sideways :-P)..Luke took a video of the whole amazing thing, but it's not working :-( The band is just unbelievable.
Here's the band during half-time. they played songs from broadway this week, and they closed with "Defying Gravity" from Wicked!! I was so thrilled, because Wicked is one of my FAVORITE musicals (second only to Phantom of the Opera).
It was a pretty exciting game. The energy from the crowd is just incomparable to anything I think I've ever experienced before. We ended up beating Wisconsin 31-13. After every touchdown, people would just give everyone else around them high fives, regardless of whether we knew each other or not. There was a little boy in front of us who kept screaming "Wisconsin stinks!!" in his little high-pitched voice. Too cute! But it was amazing just being there celebrating with everybody. Here is a picture taken after the game finally ended (it was a long game yesterday!)

Unfortunately, we had a few bumps in the road yesterday (if you'll pardon the pun :-P). Right as we were approaching Columbus, our new car that everyone told us was so reliable and would never give us any problems proved everyone wrong. It started making a really weird noise, and the guys thought it was something with the oil pressure. We didn't want to chance it, and try to drive the car all the way home. Luckily, Luke's uncle lives in Columbus, and was at the game. We had to walk a REALLY long way to meet his family at a restaurant (where I sadly could not eat b/c of my stomach). He was nice enough to let us borrow a trailer and his extremely nice truck so we could tow our little Passat all the way back home. We're going to have it looked at this week, but Luke will have to drive the truck and trailer allll the back to Columbus later this evening. And that's at least 2.5 hours each way :-/ But I'm just really thankful that the situation ended like it did, and we didn't have to pay for someone to tow our car all the way home!

Today after church we had a delicious lunch at Luke's parents' house. It was the first "real" food I had eaten in about a week, because I'm finally recovering! I don't think anything has ever tasted as good to me as that food did today :-) And I did overdo it, but it was worth every bite! After that, our friend JC took some family photos by the pretty fall leaves. I bet they turned out really nice, and I can't wait to see them :-)

Sorry this post was sooo long and had sooo many pictures. But let's face it, my posts have been pretty boring and whiney this past week, so I thought this would be a nice change of pace. I promise to be a lot less boring and lame this week!! :-D