Homecoming Tailgating

The morning after the Homecoming party in the Cathedral of Learning, we woke up bright and early (8:30 a.m.) to get ready to tailgate.

I hate noon football games.

Me and 9 a.m. tailgating do not mesh well.  At least not at first.  After about the first hour I forget about the time and warm up to the fact that I'm sitting outside, in a parking lot, drinking an adult beverage in preparation for watching a contact sport in a stadium. Tailgating is fun, no matter what time of the day it is. 

First of all, can you believe that parking lots were charging $30 for a college football game!?!??!  Outrageous, I know.  My plan was to find a scalper that we could purchase a parking pass from, but we didn't see any and traffic was crazy.  But I refused to pull into a lot that was charging $30.  $30 to put my car on their asphalt and let it sit there.  Ridiculous. 

So we finally found a parking lot that was charging $20 - still ridiculous in the grand scheme of things, but I was just happy to get my way and not have to pay $30.  So we're all excited pulling into this lot, and as we start to navigate towards the end of the rows of already parked cars, the traffic director guy waves us past the last car towards the end of the lot.  We furrow our brows in confusion, but what could we do?  He had a bright orange flag and we only had a small sport utility vehicle.  Ok, well I guess we could have done something, but we obliged him with his flag waving and parked where he instructed.

Right next to a dumpster.

At the very end of the parking lot.

With no other cars near us.

Don't believe me?  Here is proof :

Do we smell funny or something? 

And 10 minutes later...

Well, might as well get comfortable

How strange, right?  In truth, there eventually were cars parked next to us, but all of the people in them got out and walked away.  Who parks for a football game at 9:30 a.m. and then leaves?  Hopefully they had a more bouncing tailgating party to get to. 

But we made the most of it, eating Subway for breakfast....

And making fun of ourselves for apparently scaring away other people.

Look!!! There's another vehicle!!!!

We headed into the game shortly before noon, using the 100 level tickets that I had purchased from Stub Hub that were $4 dollars cheaper than the 500 level tickets that the Pitt box office was trying to sell.  Take that!

It was a cool but sunny day - perfect weather for football, really.  And we had good seats so we could really see the game. 

But DH and our guests were distracted by this man, who was sitting in front of us and apparently looked just like Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg.  I haven't watched SNL in years, but I admit that I see the resemblance.

Picture from Hollyworth.com

Have you ever tried to subtly take a picture of someone else sitting right in front of you?  Don't bother.  There's nothing subtle about it.  Thankfully Andy look alike seemed to be drunk enough not to notice. 

I had a great day.  The craziest thing about morning tailgating is that you get home at like, 4 in the afternoon!  You still practically have your entire day left and you've already done so much.  We decided to take advantage of it by taking a quick power nap and then starting back up with the festivities by having a bonfire.  Love it. 

Can't wait to tailgate again (hopefully) next year.