My Trip To Iowa

So I drove down to Champaign on Thursday to pick up a friend. He's my best sports-love buddy, and we had scored two amazing tickets (50 yard line, 16th row) to go see the Illini play the Iowa Hawkeyes in Iowa City. What we didn't know when we arrived on Friday is that 1) Iowa is a godforsaken place where only fat white people live who seem to laugh at EVERYTHING, no matter how lame (just like the laughter inserted into stupid sitcoms) and 2) This was homecoming weekend for Iowa (a tradition that started at UIllinois, thank you very much), meaning that the city was absolutely packed with Iowa fans on Friday night, which made our search for a safe place to eat just that much more difficult. The fact that we were wearing all orange probably didn't help either.


We got to the stadium early Saturday morning after spending the night in lovely Cedar Rapids, about 20 miles north of Iowa City. We got to the stadium nearly two hours early, mainly because I was concerned about the parking situation, so we got to watch the teams warm up and see our beloved coach Ron Zook before kickoff. When we walked in there were only about fifteen people in the stadium, but by kickoff that number swelled to over 70,000 - some of which can be seen in the little photo to the left. I refuse to believe, however, that those 70,000 people had that much of an effect on our team's atrocious first half play. A red zone interception, a 2nd and goal from the 4 that resulted in a missed field goal, and two other blocked field goals add up to 20 squandered points by halftime, and an Iowa lead of 14-0. The Illini never got their swagger back (don't they look motivated? - see above) and lost 35-7. We soon after high-tailed it out of Iowa City and back to our native state that we know and love. The only good things about Iowa City were a pretty campus (though it lacks a Quad, is kinda hilly for my flatlander tastes, and is bisected by an un-navigable river as far as we could tell), and a fantastic collection of African art at the University's art museum. I bought a poster from them for $2, so not all bad.

We drove back to Champaign Saturday evening, and I stayed the night because I was too tired to drive back and in no hurry to leave my friend. We caught a showing of "A History of Violence" (do not see it under ANY circumstances), and some dinner at my favorite Thai restaurant on campus. I left the next morning, and quickly found myself stuck behind a cow- and odor-filled semi for roughly half the drive to Chicago. This frustrated me greatly, but also gave me the chance to avert my gaze from the road and note that Gibson City's "Safe Days" sign was only at 3. I thought this was pretty damn funny, since that must mean that there had been a (hopefully minor) accident at the plant the day I had driven down to Champaign (that day the sign had read "56 Safe Days"). It made me chuckle. I had never passed the sign when it was that low (I make the Route 47 drive a lot - check my previous "Flatland" post), the longest streak I had ever seen was 276 safe days. Hopefully they can get it back up. So the trip was some good and some bad, but I can't complain about free hotel and football tickets, even if we did get the snot beat out of us. In any event, we did make tentative plans to invade Bloomington for the big Illinois/Indiana basketball game on January 17, so we will see how that goes.

Iowa still sucks.