Some Pictures from the Weekend....

A few random shots from the weekend spent with my Sweet Girl and going to the Georgia-Florida football game. (Did I mention UGA won? For only the 4th time in 22 tries? First time in 4 years? Did I mention I was there for that win too? No? I must be slipping.)

The Metro Diner in Jacksonville. Katydid, Frogger Blogger and I ate there when we were in Jax, so I now consider it a tradition. It's a little hole-in-the-wall joint, but the food is excellent. The weather was nice, so we didn't mind waiting outside. We only had to wait 25 minutes, and a parking place magically opened up in their postage-stamp-sized parking lot just as we drove up. It was meant to be!

The order of these pictures is sort of random, but not on purpose. This is the scene leaving the stadium. Oddly enough, when the final seconds ticked off the scoreboard, the UGA fans didn't want to leave. The players were still on the field, the band was still playing... For some strange reason, though, the Florida side of the stadium was empty.

I would love to tell you what was going on at the very moment of this picture, but I'm just not that good.

This shot was from the ramp going up to our seats. Up. And up. And up.

These folks were waiting for the UGA football players to arrive. After the team entered the stadium, they stuck around waiting for a different celebrity to arrive...

A view of the river in the background, with some of the gazillion tailgaters. People arrive as early as a week in advance of this game. And then they wonder why they don't remember the game.

This is the vehicle carrying the OTHER celebrity. Folks stood around forever waiting for Russ to appear. Russ is the interim mascot, pressed into service when Uga VIII died. If you click on the picture, you will see the vanity plate on the SUV says "UGA VIII." The same family has raised the English bulldog mascots for UGA since the 1950's. We haven't heard yet when Uga IX will make his appearance.

Please don't tell anyone we were actually in our seats this early.

This party bus is well known at all UGA football games. It belongs to a friend of Hubby's, though he has basically turned it over to the younger generation and has a DIFFERENT RV that he stays in. There is a constant stream of people up and down that ladder all day long, and most of them don't even know to whom the bus belongs. Hubby and I went to one home game on the party bus. Hubby's buddy would tell people to be at his house at 8:07 to leave for the game, and if you got there at 8:08, he would be gone.

Bad hair day. I took a little trial-size hairspray with me, but it wouldn't work. I'm not sure it would have been up to the task anyway. You can't tell it, but my shirt, my other shirt, my earrings, my sunglasses, my socks, and my shoes all had the UGA logo on them. I wore face tattoos to one game, but then I realized there were no other 50-year-old women sporting face tattoos (only college girls, and they also wear cowboy boots with dresses), so I haven't worn them since.

The view of some bridge whose name I can never remember.

There were two Florida fans in our section, and this one felt comfortable enough in his fandom to wear that head thingie with that other thingie draped around his neck. They were nowhere to be seen as the final seconds ticked off the clock. Did I mention UGA won the game?

Hey Gators.....

Hey Gators...

Chomp THIS.

Nuff said.

The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.....

I am in Jacksonville, visiting Sweet Girl for the first time in .... oh ... forever. Tomorrow we will go to the annual Georgia-Florida football game, which has been played in Jacksonville since right after Adam and Eve got thrown out of Eden. It is supposed to be a "neutral" site, but every year some Georgia fans raise sand, asking how it can be neutral when it's always in Florida. Every now and then the topic of alternating the game between Georgia and Florida comes up, and different fans (or the same ones, who knows?) raise sand because they LIKE the weekend four-day week-long event the game has become. It is unique in that the stadium is divided exactly in half, all orange and blue on one side (yuck) and red and black on the other.

I haven't been to the Ga-Fla game all that many times. I only went once in college. It was Herschel Walker's freshman year, and the game became known as the Buck Belue to Lindsay Scott game, a miraculous last-minute win by Georgia on a 92-yard pass and run play. Georgia went undefeated that year and went on to take the national championship in January.

It's hard to describe the culture of this event. It isn't just another football game. It's like the Army-Navy game without the discipline. The Ohio State-Michigan game without the cold. The UCLA-USC game only with real football players. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Sadly, it seems that someone dies every year. Not necessarily at the stadium, but in some way connected to the game. One year Hubby and I went to the game, only to read the next morning that a guy had died from a fall down the stairs at a bar just a little while after we were there. We were only there because it A) was near the stadium; and B) sold beer in cute little football-shaped mugs. For about ten bucks a pop. Good thing I gave up beer, since Hubby isn't here this year to bankroll it.

Some people say that the business people of Jacksonville really prefer for Georgia to win, because then we spend money celebrating. And we're here for the duration of the weekend. If Florida wins (as they have like 18 out of the last 21 years or something equally ridiculous, damn them), they just go on back home.

We are sincerely hoping to give the city of Jacksonville a huge economic boost tomorrow night.

Go Dawgs!!!