On Friday Sam and I headed to LAX to catch an 8pm flight to San Francisco. Because of “fog” (how unexpected for San Francisco!) our flight was delayed by two hours. We finally arrived at our airBnB rental long after midnight but were pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. We’d probably have to pay $400+ per night to stay in a hotel room this nice, but since airBnB is P2P we paid $105/night for a renovated studio apartment with hardwood floors, granite countertops, microwave, fridge, toaster oven, couch, etc. If you really want to see, it’s this one. It’s essentially exactly the same as the airbnb photos except the couch is tan now, not white and the plant in the corner is gone.
On Saturday morning we walked from the studio to breakfast at a nearby forgettable coffee shop. After that, we walked on down (and up) to Alamo Square to see the classic “Full House” painted ladies before walking on down to the Civic Center BART station. Already at the station the Buckeyes were arriving in waves five hours before the game. From there we took the BART to downtown Berkeley and walked up a few blocks onto campus. We walked through campus and came out the south side onto to Telegraph. We’d planned to walk to Zacharies Pizza, one of Cindy’s recommendations, but realized we didn’t have time. Instead we ate at Thai Noodle II, which had a great green curry that Sam swears she can make (even better) for me when we get home. Challenge accepted!
Around 3 we joined the throngs and headed up to the stadium for the game. On the way there we walked past Fox’s gameday setup, complete with a gigantic “real life” version of their creepy robot football player.
When we got to the stadium it was essentially only buckeyes that had showed up half an hour before kickoff. The photo below is on OSU’s facebook page and looks like it was taken from a press box. If you could enlarge it clearly (which you can’t) you’d see Sam and me sitting about four rows down from the right side of that giant screen.
As you can see, the Buckeyes outnumber the Bears, and it would continue like that all night. As far as we could tell the ratio of fans in the stadium seemed to be about 60:40 in our favor. It was so apparent that a few times during the game we did the O-H-I-O wave all the way around the stadium.
Script Ohio:
We were up there behind the endzone and saw first-hand four of the seven touchdowns.
Here was one of the “tumbling into the goal” touchdowns, as Sam said.
Later, another touchdown! (look around the stadium… see all that red?)
It turned into a football clinic for Sam as she was largely unfamiliar with the game. Cal even did an onside kick late in the game.
There were a few 4th and inches and Meyer, unlike Tressel, (almost) always went for it!
In the second half we got to witness a great goal-line 4th down defensive stand.
I believe this was the 4th down pass play which was broken up in the end-zone by Roby:
The only bad thing was that we had the sun beaming at us directly to our left for nearly the entire game. I’m sure our next game will have a lot less glare, and will be a little closer to home albeit probably lower scoring. Looking forward to watching us win the championship at the Rose Bowl in January 😉
After the game we stopped by crepes a-go-go for desert.
As always, more photos and higher res versions on flickr here.
