It Rains In South Bend (Part 1)

So this is Part 1 of my Notre Dame tale. Part 2 might never happen but I wanted to keep it open-ended just in case. It was a great weekend. It rained the entire time. I got maybe 8 hours of sleep total. When I got back Sunday I was drained but after sleeping 11 hours I felt fine. Then my body said "whoa whoa whoa. Wait a second. This will teach you to never do that again", and then unleashed some horrible 24 hour bug on me that had me sweating and kind of hearing voices. It was bad, readers, it was bad. But I'm back in Ann Arbor and I'm here to tell the tale. Michigan lost to Notre Dame. We sucked. However the fun that was had during the weekend made it worth it, kind of. The following photo-documentary takes place between the hours of 2:00pm last Friday and 3:00am last Saturday...beep beep beep beep beep beep. (Like they do in "24", you know?). Whatever.

Who's ready to drive on The BUS to Notre Dame? These guys.
Sweet. But when you drive a beat up school bus on the highway for longer than it should be on the highway for bad things happen....like a busted fanbelt (or 3). Uh Oh.

"Who can fix this thing?"
"I can" said the Jewish kid from Greenwich wearing designer jeans.

"Wait, so where's the engine?".

But finally six hours later and with the help of a local handyman who just happened to be in the area (thank God) we put three lawnmower fanbelts on a school bus (not advised) and deemed it ready to go. Personally, I was voting to burn the bus collect the $400 from the insurance and rent a limo. I got vetoed. The good news, now I know what a fan belt is. The bad news, it was still raining and we were sweaty and nasty. Let's get the hell out of Albion, MI.

Things started to look up after we bought $900 worth of beer at a liquor store. Let's just say, the owners were not expecting a sale like that to happen on a rainy night. Nothing was going to stop us now...not even a small inflatable football player.

"You're going down, Irish"

Commence Power Hour.


Then things started to get kinda weird.

Actually, really weird.

But we were all friends here, so it was all good. Hooray friends! Hooray Beer!
Truth be told, I sat in my seat the entire time...expect when I needed to stick my arm out of the bus to fix the windshield wiper that broke every 10 mins. Only someone as agile as a cat could do such a thing. Good thing I was on the bus.
We finally arrived in South Bend and promptly took out a huge branch and tore the top of the bus. Oops. At least we had our three lawnmower fan belts in tact.

And before we destroyed the house we decided to get together for a group picture.
Nicely done everyone. No time to shower though, since after all, there's one shower and one bathroom. Who's ready to hit on some freckle-faced irish girls? The League of Extraordinarily Not Sober Gentleman Who Drink Sparks.

Let the games begin, or actually continue, or whatever. The scene in South Bend is horrible, and add in torrential downpours and it doesn't get much better. But we made the best of it and it was a night filled with emotion.

Sometimes we yelled.....
Sometimes we smoked cigarettes and made pretend guns with our fingers....

Sometimes we spoke too loudly whilst standing next to strangers...
Sometimes we said "hey, remember when we spoke too loudly whilst standing next to you. We're sorry about that"
Sometimes we got angry because people spilled all over us and South Bend bars sucked and it was raining out...
but sometimes we got over that and had a big laugh and were happy.
and sometimes we just wanted to close our eyes while using our pinky and index finger to make a pretend phone to call.
and sometimes we were just happy to lend a hand...

And sometimes we put our head through the TV at 3am and cut our ear, requiring stitches, and needed to go to the hospital....


And so ended the first 12 hours of the trip and we kept pace throughout the entire weekend. I went to bed at about 4am that night, woke up at about 6am in the pouring rain to help set up the bus in the lot. I wanted to die. I don't have any more pics right now but hopefully I'll get some more soon. The experience at ND was something that was a "hey that was fun and I never want to do that again" type of thing. I think I'll be doing that again two more times this season though. Oh well.