Big 10 Football Tour

We don't know what our readers call a "short trip."  We call it any game that we can wake on Saturday morning and still make it to the location with several hours to tailgate before gametime.  So on this Saturday, we made the "short trip" down to Champaign.  A mere 4 hours to the "Land of Lincoln."

As you'll see on the side, we had a sighting of Old Abe on the way.  It appears that he is watching over some machinery dealership these days.

We stopped somewhere that was about an hour outside of Champaign to pick up ice for our beer.  Little did we know that we would be increasing our lifespans by buying "healthly ice."  Look closely at the photo below.   Even better than that however was the diner that we passed known as the "Haven Homestyle Diner."  Apparently the owner's 4-year-old child is in charge of marketing the diner.  When you're in rural Illinois, you expect some deviation from society's norm, but this is very North Dakota-esque.

We made it into Champaign and/or Urbana in approximately 4 hours.  While there was a variety ov choices for parking, we chose a grass lot.  The parking map from the Illinois football website is anything but simplistic for visiting fans.  There are gameday lots marked that aren't actually gameday lots and then there are lots not marked for gameday that you can actually park in.  Regardless, we chose the grass over the pavement & started having some fun on what was the coldest/wettest day of the tour yet.  To read about our tailgate experience, click HERE!

Since we didn't get a lot of response from the Illinois fans, we called some PSU fans that we met in State College, PA and told them to join us.   We also run into A LOT of Penn State fans in our tailgate area so we invited them to join the fun.  To see round 2 of our interactions with PSU fans, click HERE!

Thank God!  Finally a game that started later in the afternoon.  Some television network like ABC or MTV picked up the game and it was a 2:30 CST start time.  This would actually be the first game that we sat in the "horseshoe" of the stadium.  To see what happened during the game, click HERE!  We promise you that it'll be more than a dry game recap that you see on ESPN.

A few Illinois fans had told us to try Papa Del's Pizza while in town.  So when we got back to our hotel, we called Papa Del's.  They told us that we were outside their delivery area so we told them to go screw themselves and ordered from some place called "Garcia's Pizza in a Pan."  It was good, decent, overpriced, but extremely filling.  We've never eaten a pizza that filled us up so quickly. 

Later that evening, we checked out some of the bars on Green Street.  After a few beers, we realized that most everyplace A) had a rediculously long waiting line, B) let underage kids in, C) required a cover charge & D) had some shady characters running around. 

The road trip home was thoroughly entertertaining.  We think we saw more odd things than any other trip to date. 

The first thing we noticed was corn...A LOT of corn...and we're not even in Iowa yet!

Next we spotted what appeared to be a 12-year-old driving a Pontiac Bonneville.

When we stopped for gas, it was a rather unique gas station.  Keep in mind that we're practically in the middle of no where, at a gas station, and it has a business center.  Yes, copies, faxes, computers - everything you need when you're in the middle of a corn field.  The gas station also sold baseball cards...but the cards were from the early 90's.  Think someone just recently cleaned out the stockroom? 

We concluded our stop for gas by running around in the corn...yeah, we're really stretching for material here!

In the grass field that we set up in, there weren't a lot of exciting tailgates.  However, closer to the stadium, there were some interesting ones.  Our favorite was that of a guy we met inside the stadium.  The bus was the largest we've seen to date for tailgating and of course had the name "Chief" on the front, clearly a reference to the team that plays in Kansas City. 

We searched and searched and searched for a good shirt all day.  Let's just say that Illinois wins the award for "Least Creative Shirts" in the Big 10.  Pretty much every shirt had a "chief" on it or the word "Illinois."  Now we didn't want to choose an image of a "chief" as the best shirt as it may be considered offensive.  So why don't we choose a shirt that is just plain rediculous?  Don't follow us?  That's because "It's an Illini thing...you wouldn't understand."  Come the hell on!  Are you kidding us?  You can't come up with anything better to wear than a reference to one of the dumbest slogans of all-time?

Often our best fan competiton goes to some college guy who paints himself, wears some crazy outfit, and yells a lot.  This week however, our favorite fans were of a different demographic - Twins!.  Don't worry, they didn't resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. 

Notice the hand of God holding up the goalposts in this photo.  A great photo definitely, but to get two young children to simultaneously look at the camera is like watching the news in October of 2009 and not hearing about the Swine flu!

We had some real winners this week!  Wow!  We had to go behind closed doors for about 13-14 minutes to hash this one out.  To the left you see the winner and below rounds out the "Final 5."

Our winner just makes you say, "Wow, who really thinks that is cool?"  I mean we all "souped" up our cars when the Fast & the Furious movie was released, but this is like 8 years later!  Kudos to this guys for keeping it alive!

So Illinois was another fun weekend, but not to the previous levels.  Was it the weather?  Probably not?  The game was fun and we thought the student section was great, but nothing else really topped our list.

The negativity probably started off when Illinois staff ignored all of our emails.  Over 2 months, they didn't respond to even one.  Awesome!

We had difficulty getting feedback from the Illini fans and we didn't really meet many fans on gameday.  We tried to connect with many fans with message boards, but no one was really interested in meeting up or providing suggestions on what to see or do.  We had to coax many of them just to come over and have a beer with us; they weren't too social.

We were extemely disappointed with the bar scene.  It didn't seem safe, didn't look clean and nearly every place required a cover charge or had teenagers running around in it.

The road trip from Milwaukee is rather plain/flat, however we made the most of it.

Our first weekend of no Thank You's whatsoever.  Thanks for nothing Champaign!