After the Mississippi stay, Jen and I moved on to Denham Springs in Louisiana for the dog-sitting. Even though Halloween was quite a way off, the neighbourhood was full of decorations. There was a residents competition to see who could put the most effort in and if you didn’t have a couple of twenty-feet high inflatables in your front yard then you didn’t really stand a chance.
It’s also a big football area, or specifically an LSU town. Everywhere you go people are sporting the colours. Player images adorn the drive-throughs and on game days the supermarkets are stripped of beer and snacks for house parties.
Whilst I’m all in favour of beer and snacks I like to watch my sport live and so Jen and I went along to Tiger Stadium for the fixture with the Army. Not the whole army, but presumably their version of Sandhurst.
It was a right arse-on getting parked but eventually we were directed to some free parking in a field that was only twenty minutes or so from the venue. We passed by some serious tailgating that involved gazebos and big tellies. Some of those people won’t even have bothered going inside, preferring instead to enjoy the atmosphere in the vicinity.
We did a lap of the stadium and had a gawp at Mike the Tiger. A real tiger in an enclosure that Jen assured me was much larger than the small pen that one of the earlier Mikes lived in when she was an LSU student.
Once inside we were able to take elevators to our forty-dollar seats way up high and in time for a helicopter drop of parachutists as pre-match entertainment. There was a band too, on a much bigger scale that the one at the soccer game, with perhaps a hundred or so members marching up and down.
I got myself a crawfish pie from one of the concession stands on the basis that I’m unlikely to get the option of buying one at a game anywhere else. I don’t see them catching on.
As a contest it was far too one-sided with LSU racking up the points at will. They were so dominant that they hooked their star quarterback at half-time denying him the opportunity to set whatever records he fancied. In the end, it finished up 62-0, which is a score that you wouldn’t expect to see anywhere other than at the cricket. Nevertheless, it was a decent evening out.
Trail of the Lion King 