Yesterday I took the two boys to their first Georgia Tech game! A friend of mine has season tickets and told me that if I provided the transportation, he would provide three tickets. I couldn’t pass up that offer, so away we went.

First off let me say that my boys were and are amazing. For a 7 and 5 year old to make the trip to Atlanta (3 hours), sit through a football game (3+ hours) and then ride home (another 3 hours), they did wonderful. We had a great time and I hope this will be one of those life long memories that they will have of their “Old Man”.

My friends name is John and he is my engineering mentor. He is THE REASON I passed my Professional Engineer Exam. He graduated from Tech back in 1984 as an Air Force ROTC. Upon graduation, his assignment was to Minot, North Dakota where he worked keeping nuclear missiles ready to launch. His degree is in Mechanical Engineering, and he now does Civil, but I still comment that, at heart, he’s still a rocket scientist. Anyway, after many years in Minot, he got the choice job of helping launch satellites from Cape Canaveral. He is responsible for launching many of the original GPS satellites that we now take for granted. He left the Air Force as a Captain and learned the Civil Engineering trade.

Parking was a breeze. Man, having connections with season tickets does has it’s benefits. We had a little tailgate of our own:

John and the Boys

WunderKid1 was concerned we would not find the stadium. I re-assured him that the stadium was so big, you couldn’t possibly miss it.

Entering the stadium

As you can tell we had a great time:

Me and the Boys

We sat in the same seats from last year, which afforded us a great view.

view from our seats

Of course I had to take pictures of the cheerleaders. Though in fairness, these weren’t the real cheerleaders, amazingly it appears these “sticks” were to “thick” to be cheerleaders. The actual cheerleaders were so painfully thin, that I sold my pictures of them to National Geographic for their upcoming special on hunger in the Third World. So I’ve got that going for me. Anyway, here are some of Tech’s dancers:

Dancers

Make sure you re-read last years post to hear my funny tale about the cheerleaders from last year.

The boys had a great time, but got hungry. Let me tell you $4 fo water and Cokes, plus $5 for pretzels really hurts the old wallet, but hey, they were hungry:

Eating

WunderKid1 got the most out of the game. Being 7, he already has a rough understanding of the game. He was fascinated by the field goal posts and was thrilled to see an actual field goal kicked in the game. Here is a view from his perspective:

WunderKid1 enjoying the game

At half time, I let the boys go down to the wall separating the stands from the field. They watched the half time show and then the Clemson players warming up.

Half Time

A funny story about that. The Clemson kickers were practicing towards our seats. A few of the punts came close to entering the stands and John and I both mentioned the possibility of one of the balls hitting the kids. Sure enough, one kick went long and was heading straight down on WunderKid1. The guy in the Tech jersey at the bottom right of the above picture went for the ball and in doing so, saved WunderKid1 from a concussion. After it happened we joked about me calling WunderWife from the emergency room, “Honey, I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that WunderKid1 is in the emergency room, but he will be ok. The good news is that he has a full scholarship to Clemson as compensation for whacking him with a football.” But then I thought that would be a mixed blessing. While free college would be great, I’m not sure I could handle him going to Clemson…

In the end we won!

We Win!

At the end of the game, the sold out crowd went crazy. The loud speakers pumped in celebration music and the stands erupted with everyone jumping up and down as shown by this video:

The video does not do it justice, it was pure energy.

A great time was had by all. We rolled back into town at 1:00 am and I’m still tired.

Maybe next year we can score more tickets.