Birmingham Bowl adventure

Well, in Alabama you need to be either an “Auburn” or “Alabama” fan (college football). Everyone takes their football VERY seriously. Now, I’ve always been an Auburn fan – “WAR EAGLE”; as opposed to Alabama – “Roll Tide”. Big rivals.

Of course Alabama has had the best football team for a number of years. Auburn doesn’t manage their sports very well and gets rid of head football coaches like I get rid of leaves on my deck.

Anyway – enough of that. It turns out Auburn was invited to play in this year’s “Birmingham Bowl” (definitely not one of the big bowl games), and my #1 son got tickets and took me to the ballgame. I’d never been to an Auburn game and never been to a bowl game, so I was excited to go.

This turned out to be a serious adventure. We’re about 1-1/2 hours from Birmingham an knew the traffic would be bad, but had no idea it would be as bad as it turned out. We had prepaid parking at a nice parking garage – but getting to it was a nightmare. The Birmingham police were useless in traffic control. SO, a 1-1/2 hour trip actually took almost 3 hours by the time we got parked.

THEN we had to get to the stadium – which was 1/2 mile away. Now, I knew this, I guess I just didn’t realize how FAR 1/2 mile was for an old lady who hasn’t walked much in the last few years.

We finally made it to the stadium (along with 9 million of our closest friends) and discovered our seats were all the way at the other end – another very long walk, a lot of which was uphill. FINALLY got to our seats for the ballgame.

Forecast was for rain, however…. it was about 70 degrees and bright sunshine. Not a problem, I was not looking forward to rain. Brand new stadium and the nicest cleanest rest rooms I’ve ever seen at a public facility.