Out with 200,000 of our closest friends!

Feeding into my sense of adventure (or maybe I'm just plain crazy), I talked Dusty into going downtown with me last night for one last taste of the Super Bowl action.  I gave Aaron the option of going or staying at home with a pizza and 2 liter of Mountain Dew.  He choose to stay home and babysit his sister.  Good choice for us, because I'm not sure maneuvering kids through the crowd would have been good.  Our 1st stop was the ESPN broadcast on the Pan Am Plaza.  Got right up on the barrier and watched as they broadcast on ESPN2.  Called by brother-in-law Joel (who's a huge sports fan) multiple times to tell him I was on TV right by Trey Wingo's elbow.  After soaking up our 15 minutes of teeny-tiny fame we moved on.

The streets were packed!  I mean shuffle along with the crowd, no elbow room, gotta go with the flow because you can't do anything else packed.  We made our way to Monument Circle and found some breathing room behind the roman numerals up on the monument.  This was the scene down Meridian St.  It was like this all over downtown.  The news helicopters were flying overhead and the broadcasts were saying that they had never seen anything like it in the history of the city.  They were estimating 150,000 - 200,000 people were downtown.  Police were forced to close off even more streets because of the sheer numbers.

While moving back toward Georgia Street we got into the middle of a crowd outside the Conrad hotel.  Since it's one of the most expensive hotels in the city I figured we were waiting for a celebrity to come out. I asked someone who they were waiting for.  They shrugged and said, "I don't know."  A few minutes later someone asked me the same question.  The response, "Who knows?"  Police and security insisted that no one was coming out and repeatedly stated that Madonna was not there! :)  Didn't diminish the fun.  Every so often some regular Joe guest of the hotel would come out and the crowd would cheer for the fun of it. :)  Celebrity rumors were everywhere....Johnny Depp's at St. Elmo's steakhouse....Madonna's at the Conrad....Ryan Gosling is over one the corner of Georgia and Illinois streets.  So we had our laughs with that and moved on after a few minutes.

So to recap here's the lessons learned

• If your going to rub elbows with 200,000 people...leave the kids at home
• Madonna is NOT staying at the Conrad
• If you skip dinner to get downtown in a timely manner, Cinnabon is an acceptable substitute
• Be grateful for the man who directed you to the LAST parking spot by the stadium
• The trouble to get there is worth it so you can call your brother-in-law and tell him that at that very moment you are on ESPN
• If you are from Los Angeles and I offer to help take your family's pic with the stadium in the background, I'll turn the flash off on your point and shoot camera to get a semi-decent photo