Clemson Game

I got to go the Clemson game the weekend after my parents left. My friend from work Caroline ended up with an extra ticket and invited me to go. She is a South Carolina fan (major Clemson rival) but is a bigger fan of sports in general so she goes to as many games as she can get her hands on tickets for...not to mention the fact that her ticket source is so fantastic that you get to sit field level with faculty and family of the players. Clemson is only about 1-1.5 hours from Greenwood, but most of it is on freaky two lane highway. Which is how everything is here, but I for some reason thought there would be large highway/interstate all the way to the front door of the ball game like KSU. I was very wrong. The Clemson tailgate experience is major for sure. Not to mention complete chaos. It makes me very proud of how orderly the KSU stuff is but at the same time the mayhem makes for some interesting stuff. All of the paved tailgate areas are spread out all around the stadium, then they have a whole bunch of open fields they have folks park in. I realize that the set up at KSU is similar with the area north of the stadium, but I know most first grade kickball games are more organized than what I observed! No one was in charge of parking anyone or making sure anyone was obeying any sort of rules of orderly anything. There are also an additional 50,000 people tailgating, which I suppose complicates things a bit. Oh, they also put one of their porta-potties half on the curb...which is the one I got..which subsequently caused my beer to tip over and soak all of the remaining toilet paper that I hadn't used...whoops. Nothing can make you feel fatter than knowing there is a giant line of people standing outside the porta-potty watching while you almost tip it over turning around in it since it is on the curb. Luckily the guy behind it was a lot heavier than me, so any memory of me rocking the potty was quickly erased when he actually did almost tip it over...for real.
The game itself was pretty amazing. The girl who routs for KSU and the girl that routs for South Carolina University both ended up on the Jumbo Tron more than once as they were on the front row of the end zone during the most important game of Clemson's season against Boston College. Kinda surreal seeing yourself in greater than lifesize with 100,000 other folks watching. Lots of things go through your head: "Don't look down at the camera, you'll have five chins!", "Do I have anything hanging out of my nose?", "Why did I decide to wear the orange shirt under the purple jacket, Nikki is going to kill me if she sees this on TV!"
The realization of how having no one in charge of organizing anything can be a problem was made very obvious when we tried to leave the tailgating area....It took us an hour to get out of the parking lot. I mean sitting in the car as there is no traffic flow happening anywhere for an hour. Not a cop, not a kid with a light up stick, not any help at all for dog eat dog world of the parking lot after a loss. Then we had to drive in stop and go traffic for another hour trying to get onto the interstate. Then it was an hour home. So, it took us twice as long as it should have...2:30 in the morning is when I got home.. And it was my weekend to work so I was up at 6:45. Not awesome at all. Yikes.