Welcome to Miami

I generally hate New Years... I think it's a terribly depressing holiday and I always end up staying home with nothing exciting to do. This year, Penn State made my holiday season something special by securing a bid in the BCS Orange Bowl in Miami, FL. The Zombie Nation moved south! Thirty-three, in particular, moved into the Yerkes residence for a week.

Doug and I caught a flight out from Baltimore late afternoon on New Years Eve... we arrived in Miami at 11 pm. Kim (Caitlin's mom) picked us up at the airport and drove us to South Beach, where we met up with Cait and a dozen of the PSU crew that had already arrived. 12 down... 21 more to arrive! We celebrated life, happiness, college degrees from an amazing institution and the arrival of the new year on South Beach and later crashed in the hotel suite we rented on Ocean Drive. We spent the next day soaking in the warm Florida sunshine on the beach and then headed back to Cait's house to settle in with all the new arrivals. It was like living in a fraternity for a week - 10 air mattresses on the floor... people occupying every free inch of floor space, couch space, pool table space, etc. It was wonderful. Nobody complained about sleeping 2 feet from a stranger or having to take showers at odd times during the day (because of only having 3 showers for 30 people). There was a lot of positive energy with this group.

In many ways, the event was like summer camp (minus the beer). We coordinated group meals and group drinking sessions (all in all, we drank 3 kegs and 50 cases of beer, I've been told... or maybe the numbers keep growing as the legend always does). We partied it up like only Penn Staters know how to.

The day before the game, we partied both at the official PSU pep rally and on the beach for the official Orange Bowl Beach Bash (which PSU outnumbered FSU 9-to-1) and sang fight songs and did cheers and drank to Doug's fantastic power hour. It felt like freshman year all over again, minus the bitchy friends.

Then there was the tandem slip-n-slide... you can only imagine what fun 20-somethings can have with that.

The tailgate at the bowl game was an all-day affair (11 AM to 7 PM) and was fantastic - 80 degree weather, bikinis, amazing food, beer pong and good friends. We had one point of fear when we prematurely kicked our keg of cheap Haitian beer - but Curtis' friend came to the rescue. He actually bartered a game ticket with another tailgate to get us another keg - Yuengling, nonetheless. Another kid walked 3 miles to buy beer at the nearest convenience store and carried it back to the tailgate- 3 cases of it!

The game was awesome even though PSU nearly gave us all heart attacks. But we won and all was right with the world.

Definitely the party of the year and a killer way to start off 2006. I'll never forget this trip.