What Game Day means to us...

This weekend Mark and I will be making the drive to Tallahassee for OUR first home game of the 2010 FSU Football Season. We missed the first home game due to our wedding being later that day in South Florida. For me, it will be the first time I have been back since my graduation in May 2009. I CANNOT wait!!!

I feel like it was yesterday that Mark and I got engaged and a week later we were flying to Jacksonville to attend Bobby Bowden's last game as FSU's head coach. After that game, Jared Roche (Mark's best man and best friend) made sure to sit Mark down and make both he and I FSU Boosters and purchase our Season tickets. Not that that it took much convincing for Mark... ;)

We have been looking forward to the drive up with friends, tailgating at Doak Campbell Stadium ( now that we have our fancy parking passes for the stadium!), and watching our Seminoles play. There is nothing quite like the Fall season for us. For Mark and I, it means: the season we fell in love 13 years ago - 10/27/97, our rival high school football games, and now our college football games! We love the weather, the smell in the air, and the energy that school spirit brings.

St. Thomas Aquinas HS (my high school) playing Cardinal Gibbons HS (Mark's high school)

Doak Campbell Stadium is like our cathedral. I know it sounds crazy, and it may very well be... but when we drive by and see Bobby Bowden's stained glass window watching over, it makes us very proud to call it Home. We have so many memories with friends in the days of preparing game day dishes, assembling game day wardrobes, painting each other's faces, waking up to the FSU Warchant blaring through the house on game day, making the "walk over" to the stadium all together while screaming FSU chants, and knowing that rain or shine you WILL stand the entire game cheering the Noles on...

This Friday evening at 6pm we will begin the drive up, stopping in Jacksonville for the night and finishing the drive over with Jared and Jacki Roche the following morning---and I mean MORNING. We will be those obnoxious people in Jared's F-250 blaring the Warchant.
Hope to see you there fellow Noles!!!!

In Seminole Spirit,
Christina McGuire