Stanford vs UCLA

This past Saturday we jumped on the Caltrain and headed to Palo Alto for a Stanford football game. This was not only the first time we'd been to Stanford, but also the first time we used the Caltrain as our transportation. I know I've mentioned it before, but San Francisco has the most amazing public transportation I've ever see. Anyways, the Caltrain runs from the city all the way south to Gilroy (the home of the garlic festival by the way. You can smell garlic when you dive through the town, no joke).

More on the campus tomorrow (which is pretty darn cool!), but today I want to talk about the tailgate and the football game. Stanford has a fan fest area open to anyone that we took full advantage of. There was free posters, free face painting, contests, etc. We both decided to try our luck with a football toss game. After standing in line for a while I knew I wouldn't make a fool of myself... no one else was making it in the hole! Plus we knew even if we didn't get a single football through the hole we'd still win the same prize. We both chose sunglasses and rocked them out until the sun went down.

I attempted to look as excited as I could in this cutout picture. If the football player, who is Andrew Luck by the way, was excited I figured my face should show that too.

Sadly this is the only picture we got of the two of us. It's always so hard to keep asking people to take our picture. Oh well, I figured one was good enough.

The tickets Joe bought for this game included one burrito and drink. The burrito was amazing and they let us redeem the drink ticket for a beer. What could be any better? Oh and if you noticed our Stanford shirts, we hit up the bookstore before the game.

One thing I picked up on right away was how untraditional the marching band is at Stanford. You can't really even call them a marching band. They don't march, they run in circles and find their spot on the field. They don't carry nicely polished instruments, some of the brass ones were painted. They don't even wear the same costume. Basically they all wear a red coat, black pants and the ugliest tie they could find. Entertaining it was! We read in our program that this style spurred from an uproar year ago. The new director decided to let the students roll with their modern music and bizarre style.

Another tradition for the university is "the walk". It started in the '20s when the locker rooms were across campus. The team would walk from the locker rooms to the stadium before the game. We stumped upon this with perfect timing (we didn't know anything about it until we read more in our program). We got up close with the football team and I snapped probably 75 pictures of the team and the band that followed. Joe spotted Andrew Luck right away so I made sure and got some good pictures of him. He's really the only player that I know anything about.

Finally we made our way into the stadium. Joe and I both agreed it was the cleanest, nicest stadium we've ever been to (well maybe other than Kinnick). In all seriousness, the stadium was renovated in 2006 and it looked like it was done just this year.

We thought this picture was cool because the shadow is a tree... shadowing the tree on the stone... get it?

We walked around and snapped some quick pictures of the stadium.

Our seats weren't the best, but the whole stadium was about sold out. When the game was about to start and the sun had just gone down I snapped a few more pictures. The color in the clouds was amazing.

Then the game started and we cheered Stanford on to a victory. Now that we've seen them play in person Joe and I will be cheering for them to do well this whole season.

Luck for Heisman!! :)