Before we went into the hospital to have Carter in February, Matt and I exchanged our 1st anniversary gifts for one another. Since it was our “paper” anniversary, Matt worked with our wedding photographer to come up with a beautiful 16X20 photo collage photograph (it’s hard to explain) from our wedding. I absolutely love it, and it’s one of those keepsakes that will last a lifetime. I, on the other hand, wasn’t so sentimental. I purchased a couple of Pittsburg Steelers Terrible Towels, and told Matt that my paper gift is tickets to his first Steelers game, but since tickets weren’t on sale yet, we’d have to purchase them later. I told him that I’d prefer to stay close to home since they are playing the NFC North and the AFC West this year, so he focused on the Chicago and Kansas City games. Since Chicago’s game was at the beginning of the season and both the Steelers and the Bears were rated as good teams, it was impossible to find tickets at a reasonable price, so Matt held out until he found tickets to the Kansas City Chiefs game scheduled for November 22nd.
Last Saturday morning, we took off for Kansas City. We had a little detour to drop Carter off with Grandma and Papa Souder, but made it to KC by 3:30pm. Of course, we went to Cabela’s first where Matt found some goodies in the bargain cave, and then it was off to the hotel. Since neither one of us felt like driving around KC on a Saturday night, we opted to stay at the hotel to have dinner and to watch the Husker game. Unfortunately, the food was only mediocre, and we were the only ones watching the game in the bar/lounge area, so it wasn’t our best decision of the weekend, but at least we were able to just walk back to our room and get to sleep quickly once the game was over.
We actually “slept in” on Sunday morning, but it wasn’t easy for me since I’m used to being up by 6:15 every morning. We showered, put on our Steelers gear, and headed down for breakfast. Surrounded by Steelers fans, we were excited about going to the game and finally putting our terrible towels to good use! We went back to the room, tucked our terrible towels into our jean pockets (we only knew to do this after seeing what everyone else did), took our luggage to the car, and then rode the hotel shuttle to the game. We knew that Steelers fans travel for their team, but it wasn’t until we stepped off of the shuttle that we realized it would be difficult for KC fans to form a sea of red for the game. It was hard to see much red when we were surrounded by so much black!
You’d think that with all of these black and yellow lovers, we would have met a lot of Steelers fans and Matt could have spent his Sunday morning talking stats with fellow Polamalu followers. But we found that Steelers fans didn’t really talk to other Steelers fans. Everyone kept to themselves or to their group, and didn’t venture to network. We also learned that while they seemed to want to keep to themselves, they were quite friendly when we would “break the ice”. It was definitely different from the Husker and Packers games we’ve been to in the past where if someone is wearing your team’s colors, they’re automatically your friend. Matt made a good point that maybe they were just acting this way because they were in KC, rather than being at home. We’ll have to go to a game in Pittsburgh to find out.
Anyway, since we didn’t know anyone to tailgate with, we went into the stadium and found our seats. It wasn’t long before we decided to get closer to the field to get a better view of the players as they came out on the field to warm up. So, we headed down to the first level to see the players “up close and personal”, and were surrounded by “super fans”. You know, the kind that go to every single game, have the cameras that can zoom in on pimples, they buy the “chiefs versus the steelers” t-shirts from the gift shops, and know up to the minute stats on all of the players. I imagine their homes to be cluttered with Steelers memorabilia and they could probably talk for hours about details of plays from the 80’s. Once we had a few of our own photos of the players warming up, we decided to head back to our seats and watch the game.
While I don’t think I need to list the details of the game, I think I do need to mention that terrible towels need to come with a few instructions to help those of us who are new at using them. Sure, they look easy enough – grab the end, hold over head, and rotate arm in clockwise or counter-clockwise direction (whichever is easier) to give the towel the desired spin. But there are certain things we had to learn about the towel.
First, hold the towel out in front of you rather than directly over your head. It’s definitely easier to hold it directly over your head, but the thing is pretty long, so there is a risk of injury to the fans behind you as you whip the towel around at their head/eye level. If you do choose to spin the towel directly over your head, hold it by the middle of the towel, rather than by the corner. This results in less towel spin, but fewer injuries.
Secondly, you should spin your towel with medium speed (which is harder to do during long pass receptions, touchdown scores, and quarterback sacks). Again, this is for the safety of those around you (as well as yourself). When I first spun my towel, I was trying to go as fast as I could and not only did it drain quite a bit of my own energy, it sucked to get hit in the face with a fast spinning towel when the wind gust came and altered the path of my towel…which is also something I wasn’t expecting (the wind or breeze from a fellow towel waver to alter the path of my own towel).
Lastly, when you get really excited or really upset as the result of a play, do not under any circumstances do a quick downward motion with your towel followed by a quick upward motion. We’ve all be subject to the towel snap right? Well, it’s all fun and games until you accidentally do it to someone you don’t even know and who’s fully capable of kicking your tail. Fortunately, I didn’t hit anyone, but I was mere inches from faces of fans in front of us a couple of times when I accidentally whipped my towel down. Something I know I need to watch more closely.
For those of you who did not watch the game, I regret to tell you that the Steelers lost in overtime. Once the game was over we quickly exited our seats and the stadium, made our way to the hotel shuttle, and jetted out of town in order to get home at a decent time. Overall I think Matt had a good time (I know I did), and we’ll probably do it again sometime. And while the free football was great (we only pay for 4 quarters, right?), it would have been a better time had the Steelers been able to pull out a win.
Oh yeah, on our way down to KC we had to go through Falls City, NE and while on our way out of the town, we were following this truck that had two dogs in the back of it. All of the sudden, one of the dogs jumped up onto the tool box and started walking back and forth on it. We thought the dog was extremely daring!!! To our surprise, the dog then jumped on top of the cab of the truck!! He looked like super dog – tongue waving, ears flapping, hair blowing in the 35 mph wind. Matt and I both tried to get pictures of it while it was atop of the cab, but the driver was quick to bang the ceiling in the truck to get the dog to jump back down to the tool box. All we got was this one of the dog on the tool box…
