Sugar Bowl Trip, Part I
1-6-05
By: Ryan

In the past week, I have logged over 1400 miles on my vehicle. The trip from Charlotte to Birmingham (theauburner.com corporate headquarters) was a good 400 miles, and the trip from Birmingham to New Orleans was about 350 miles. My Black 4Runner, Tanya, said she would never forgive me, but she’s all talk. Anyways, there are many things to note about this trip. I may try to elaborate on things, which could take several articles, or I could just rush through things since I am sleepy right now and want to take a nap. I will do my absolute best to do both.

To give a slight prologue about our trip, I had taken the liberty to book the absolute cheapest hotel available, which went at about 100 bucks a night, starting New Years Eve, and checking out January 4th. I thought everything was going to be dandy until Mark decided to ruin everything and read reviews about our hotel. Apparently our hotel had been closed down about a month earlier due to excessive rodent and roach problems, and reopened just recently. Multiple accounts testified that the water was brown and the TV did not have cable. One review said that a homeless person barged into their room while they were sleeping, and that the rooms did not have locks. Since we are the fearless heroes that you have come to love and look up to for inspiration, we merely laughed in the face of danger and infection and carried on.

On our way to New Orleans, we were followed by a car that was sporting several pro-Auburn markings all over the vehicle. They had spotted the notorious theauburner.com bumper sticker and were immediately intrigued. They pulled over at the same gas station as us, and one of our Mac Writers, Jacob, approached the two young lady tiger fans and asked if they would join us for some fine dining at a nearby McDonalds. Jacob was exchanging some friendly banter with the females as well as all the others with us. Apparently, nothing retarded enough had been said yet, so I took it upon myself to do so. I jerked me head around and looked at one of them and said “Are you a Georgia fan?” because she looked familiar to a girl I had retardidized myself in front of at a party a while back. She said “Oh no, we absolutely hate Georgia” or something to that extent. I go back to my double cheeseburger, and then swiftly jerk my head back around and said “well that’s good, because I’ve been working on my jump kick and I have the right mind to run up this wall, jump off of it and nail you both.” Very classy Ryan. Excellent word choice. I could not go a single conversation with a female without bringing up some form of violent maneuver. The saddest part is that I did not remember saying that, I was told that I did this. And at least 150 jokes involving the word ‘nail’ were made at my expense throughout the trip.

So we got to our room, which was pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as we thought it would be. Oh well, so we hit the streets for New Years and roam the city. Since I am the totally cool guy that you all assume I am, I had to live up to the reputation and ask for a 512 MB memory card for my camera for Christmas. I took 266 photos on this trip, and I had found out that roughly half of my pictures were of buildings and men in drag, the two least fascinating parts of New Orleans. We went around town looking for people to tell us where a ball drop was, and all of them said, “Maaaaan, there ain’t no ball drop!” But we continued to wander around and ask, getting the same response in different languages. Well, we wandered around enough until we found, guess what, a big ball of light at the top of a building by the river. Sadly, the river serves more as a smoke machine than a source of water. We could barely see the ball to begin with, and we waited for new years to roll around, then all of a sudden we heard “3, 2, 1 AAAAAAAAAGH!” Everyone just screams instead of yelling “Happy New Years”. So we practically missed it.
We were at a hotel directly across town from the Hilton, which is where the Auburn football team stayed, and where there was supposedly an Auburn-related event every night, which we went to every night, which we were fooled every night, and were laughed at by transvestites every night. There was a “Pep Rally” where there was a band and two games to play. But this was an Auburn/VT combined rally, which sucked, because the Hokies outnumbered us like 5 to 1, I presume because all the Auburn students and Alumni were working and benefiting society at the time. Everyone in our party tried at some football toss game, and we all failed, which was 103 tries (if my math is correct) to get the stupid ball through the hole, which only took a 6 year old one try immediately following our failure.

What else. Oh yeah! Mark, our good friend Randy, and myself went into some brewery place for dinner, and who do we find, none other than Al “Gorgeous” Borges, the legendary Offensive genius who turned this football program around. Mark and I followed him around with our cameras while he was being seated whispering to each other “No, you do it”, “No man, you do it”, “Okay, if you do it, I’ll give you five bucks”, “No, but if you don’t do it, I’ll nail you.” Well, Al had made one or two regretful moments of eye contact with us, and he finally turned to us and said “Alright guys, let’s get this over with”… Awesome. Sadly, Al opened up more to Mark and put his arm around him, while giving me the cold shoulder. I don’t blame him though, I looked like I hadn’t showered in a week, when it had actually been two months.

Up next, the bowl season wrap up, and then the Sugar and Orange bowl thoughts!

Ryan can be contacted at ryan@theauburner.com