I have a lot to say about my whirlwind trip, but I won’t get to it all now. Bottom line: Good trip and worth the trouble. I am going to focus on the positives tonight and talk about the problems and lessons learned later. Pat, Chris, and I arrived in Miami after midnight on Tuesday due to delays. In the morning we met with Jenna, Jess, Rob, and Cat and got breakfast in the hotel restaurant. It was a nice buffet, though the place was very empty. Afterwords we picked up our game tickets and got ready to go to the beach.

We took a shuttle from the hotel (which was by the airport) to Miami Beach. It was nice because the short drive seemed to cut through the town and give us an idea of what the city is like. Palm trees are everywhere and every building is pastel colored. It seems like there were patches of downtown mixed with residential areas throughout the city. It’s a neat city and very different from what I am used to. They let us off a block away from the beach in a pretty high-class shopping district. The weather was nice and the water was relatively warm, comparable to June in Ocean City, NJ. Except it was January. We figured it must be a cold day for Florida because we saw more Penn State fans out on the beach than Florida State fans.

We got lunch at Johnny Rockets, which is supposed to be a fifties-style hamburger shop, though I don’t think the open air street café really reflected that time period well. It was a good lunch and ended up being the last real meal I got on the trip. Some beach bums walked by making some comment about tourists, which kind of ticked me off a bit given they’re just rich and lazy.We got back to the hotel by taxi after some shuttle difficulties. We quickly got changed and boarded a bus to take us to Dolphins Stadium.

Even football stadiums have to have a lot of color in Miami, which set Dolphins Stadium apart from the multi-sport stadiums I have seen in the past. We were in a corner, but our seats were in Row 9, which meant we were really close to the field. The bowl games run longer than typical college games since there a lot of entertainment and stuff added in. There are also lots of commercial breaks that break up the action. Sharing the stadium with thousands of Florida State fans made the experience very different from my past experiences in Beaver Stadium.

I won’t recap the game too much, since you can find out about that elsewhere. Basically it was a good defensive football game, which digressed into a bizarre triple-overtime game. It made things very dramatic and very stressful. Fortunately we came out on top. I was glad Kevin Kelly was able to win it for them at the end, as redemption for his previous misses. Austin Scott also came out of nowhere to have a great game. I hope Posluszny will make a full and quick recovery.

The long game meant we didn’t get back to the hotel until early this morning. We had early flights which meant little sleep for us. I was happy to finally get home at 1pm today. I enjoyed the day in Miami a lot but the travel experience not so much. I’ll have more details later. You can see my pictures here on Flickr, I spent a couple hours updating a couple months worth of photos. That’s all for tonight. Go Longhorns!