Road to Miami...

I landed in OKC from Denver an hour late with a monster headache from the altitude change, so the plans changed.

As a side note, I had an amazing time in Colorado. It’s always great to get together with that group of guys. I wish we got to hangout more often.

We drove down to my parents’ house in north Dallas and crashed there for the night.

We got up the next morning and were on the road by 4:45 AM. You know it’s an early start when you have to drive an hour before McDonald’s opened, so we could get our overly nutritious breakfast.

It rained for the first 7-8 hours of driving or so, until we got halfway through Louisiana, so that was fun. Especially when my wipers were sitting out in the cold at the OKC airport for ten days and insisted on making an obnoxious noise every time the rain turned to a drizzle.

I must say that there were stretches of Louisiana that literally stank. But there were also parts of Louisiana that I hadn’t anticipated. There was so much water. There was an intimidatingly large amount of water. We drove past a stretch where they were building a new bridge over a lake; according to Mike the one we were driving on was deemed unsafe after Katrina (not what you want to hear while driving over a large body of water). Nonetheless, it was extremely impressive to see the machinery and equipment that goes into building a bridge across a large body of water.

The Superdome

After a short stint in Mississippi and Alabama, we hit Florida, which meant we were a little past halfway.

We kept ourselves entertained by watching the first season of Bones. We hooked the FM transmitter to the headphone jack on my laptop and let it roll. This turned out to be a great way to pass the time. Thanks to Mike’s forethought, we also had some great snackage. How do I always forget how awesome Teddy Grahams are?

We grabbed some photos along the road, but once we hit Florida we played around with Mike’s wide angle and some SB-800s as another way to keep ourselves entertained. We kept hoping for more background imagery, but by this point there wasn’t much traffic and even if there was there was a large median separating us from the traffic going the other way, thus no cool taillights.



At 3:00 AM and 20 miles from our hotel, the turnpike we were on was completely shutdown and we had to take a monster detour to get back on it. Not exactly something that makes you happy after 22 hours of driving. Finally we rolled into our hotel about 3:30 AM, exhausted.

Corey made it to the hotel around 5:30 AM, apparently. I didn’t even hear him knock, but he was sleeping on the floor when I woke up at 2 PM!!! To be fair, it’s an hour later here, but I woke up at 9:30 and considered getting out of bed, and then it was 2, not sure how that happened.

Tonight, I want to make it down to Miami (we’re at the media hotel is in Ft. Lauderdale) to cover some of the Miami nightlife surrounding the National Championship game.

Then tomorrow is the big game. I hope to cover the tailgating tomorrow morning/early afternoon before the game.

More to come…