Washtenaw County

We were lucky to arrive in time for the American Football season. Nancy told us that there would be a game on Saturday and invited us to her hospital group's tailgating.
We also asked Ember, one of Birte's good friends from her time in Ann Arbor, and she was up for it immediately. Somehow she even managed to get us free tickets! Thank you, Ember!
The city goes crazy during game days. Just imagine 109.000 people in a stadium in a city with only 120.000 inhabitants 🤯
In the vicinity of the stadium there are tailgating parties in many gardens, all public parks, and even on the golf course. Many house owners rent out their driveways and front yards as parking lots. You can smell barbecue at every corner and see people throwing footballs across parking lots and streets. Some people brought their own TVs and placed them in the back of the car to watch the live broadcast before the game begins.
After three hours of tailgating and playing Cornhole, we went into the stadium. It was quite impressive to enter it. Since we waited almost until the game began, the stadium was pretty much filled already. Stepping out of the entry tunnel it got loud and bright. Blue and yellow everywhere. The marching band, the dancing group and the cheerleaders were firing up the crowd, T-Shirts were thrown up the first couple of rows, and in the background you could see the large amount of football players enter the stadium under a roar of the fans and collective shouts of "Go Blue!".
The weird thing about an American Football games is that there is just no break for your senses. The game stops all the time, but as soon as the referee blows the whistle, the cheerleaders, dancers, a frisbee catching dog, and the huuuuge stadium screens take over to continue the constant entertainment. More than once, we missed single plays in a round because there was just so much other stuff going on 😵‍💫🙃
It was an intense and really fun experience.

On our way home from the stadium, we got ourselves some icecream to cool off. The sun had been shining mercilessly all day except for the morning, when it looked like it would start raining any minute, which caused us to forget to put sun screen on. A mistake we would see and feel for days to come...Lue lisää