Wednesday, December 14, 2005
On the third day of Christmas
The 12 Days of Christmas MemoriesTime for another memory...sorry about this being so late, but I was at a mediocre concert with mediocre acts....later I might even post some mediocre pictures. The crowd was mediocre this year too...we left half way through the last artists.
Ok, so here we go.
On the third day of Christmas my memory gave to me....
My first Christmas in Florida
It was Christmas of '89 and I was a huge Notre Dame fan....today I am not. Notre Dame was having a great season...that is until 11/25 when they played the Miami Hurricanes. That game gave ND their first loss of the year and that meant that they went into the break between the last game of the year and the bowl games with an 11-1 record.
I remember the drive down to Florida....we were all in a Chevy Corsica and my brother and I were fighting most of the trip over the Game Boy. I was 10, my little brother was 7. We only had one Game Boy, a couple games, and a lot of batteries. Needless to say who had the Game Boy turned into an epic battle.
The trip down was pretty much radio only, and the radio was filled with lots and lots of countdowns, it was '89 and the '80s was fading into the history book! Lots of top 100 song countdown of the decade was on the radio. I really wish that I was able to record one of these and listen to it now....it would have been quite interesting!
Our car was only a couple of months old but all the way down we had issues with stalling. This definitely kept the trip interesting as we stalled in the middle of an intersection!
We get down to Florida and show up at the Grandparents. My grandparents lived in Sebring FL at the time. My parents took over the spare room, Brad and I got the living room.
Christmas was pretty uneventful....we didn't have a Christmas with gifts under the tree. We had our Christmas back home before we left. We did have a big meal though....turkey and all the trimmings.
A few days after Christmas we had the main event....the Orange Bowl!
Notre Dame was playing Colorado in the Orange Bowl....unfortunately because of those Miami bastards ND's back-to-back National Championship chances were no a long shot. We had tickets and we were so excited to go!
New Years Day rolled along and that meant the bowl game! We drove down to Miami, through the glades and sugar cane fields and into Miami. I don't remember much of Miami, only that my parents were talking about how scary the area was. We found a parking spot near the Orange Bowl and went towards the stadium.
Unfortunately the stadium was not open yet, so we walked around many of the vendors. They had Cubans out cooking shish-ka-bobs (sp?) and we ate some of those. Eventually the gates opened and we went to the game. The game was exciting, but I don't remember much of it. I believe that the half time act was Chubby Checker or someone like that. After the game we drove back (us kids slept) and my parents were tired on the trip back.
We would leave Florida shortly after that and head back to the cold state of Indiana. It was a fun trip, and my first Christmas outside of Indiana.
