While most people on the coasts don’t give Indianapolis a lot of credit, the city sure can host an event. Remember how great the 2010 Final Four was? That was just practice for this year’s Super Bowl, and the city was as impressive as the 1985 Chicago Bears defense (OK, I’ll make that the first and last awkward football analogy in this post). Of course it helped that the weather was warm (50 degrees+) and there was hardly any rain.
On the Wednesday prior to the game, we made the short drive downtown to check out all the festivities. While the area around Georgia street was quite packed, we enjoyed seeing some of the free concerts, roman numerals on Monument Circle, ESPN studios filming live shows, and zip line (unfortunately there wasn't a chance to ride on it). What we didn't enjoy were the massive crowds (and it got far worse the other evenings later in the week) and the plethora of cigarette smoke and Bud Light - Super Bowl Village basically smelled like a giant bar, which made it a little kid-unfriendly. Bud Light aluminum bottles were $8, yet people seemed to be OK shelling out that much money to drink horrible beer outside on the street.
(Apologies for the quality of the pictures – the only camera we had for this event was Lynne’s iPhone)
Eliza really enjoyed watching the ESPN shows being filmed in Pan Am Plaza, and she even waved to the camera and could be seen in the background on one of the shows. Of course, her favorite thing about the ESPN area was seeing her favorite TV personalities, Wilbon and Kornheiser, on a gigantic screen. They weren’t there live, but PTI (and all ESPN programming) was being showed on huge screens around the area. I’ve trained her well, and yes, I rocked the Drew Brees Super Bowl MVP shirt, much to the chagrin of non-Purdue Indianapolis folks (the Colts lost that year), but with all the Patriot paraphernalia for them to boo, it didn’t get much notice.
Eliza’s other favorite moment was watching some cheerleaders perform on the street, which had been turned into a giant football field. You can see the zip line overhead.
At the end of our evening, Eliza enjoyed all the music that was being played and loved running around the Monument dancing and yelling. Meanwhile, we were more interested in watching Jimmy Fallon get interviewed inside the theater where he did his show on site that entire week.
And after all of that fun, it turned out that the thing that excited Eliza the most was something that can always be found downtown – the horse drawn carriages. She loved seeing the large horses, petting them, and talking to them.
Here’s hoping Indy gets another Super Bowl in the next 10 years – as a non-native I can honestly say they greatly deserve it for running such a smooth show that seemed to keep everyone entertained.
You can see how we enjoyed the festivities without the kids in the next post…
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