XLIV (part II)

We left New Orleans on Thursday headed to Miami! We were able to ride the charter down, so it was a quick non-stop flight!  On Thursday night, the team had a welcome party for the friends and family that flew down that day at the hotel pool!  It was a lot of fun, but a little chilly!  The pool area was on the roof, in between two buildings and it was WINDY! I mean, it was at least blowing 30-40 mph it seemed...so needless to say I didn't get many pictures!  But it was fun, and a lot of the players were there with their families!

Here is the one pic I took (I took it when we were leaving, so the "s" and "a" had melted already!):

And here is the team hotel, which was all decked out in Saints stuff everywhere!

 

At first, when we were riding the busses in, I thought it was weird that there were only Saints billboards all through Miami ??!  Then we found out that the Colts team was staying in Ft. Lauderdale, and they actually flew into that airport as well.  When we went to Ft. Lauderdale Friday night for the NFL Comissioner's party, it was only Colt's billboards!  It was really neat how they had both teams completely seperated (even down to all the billboards and signs on the interstates!)

On Friday night, we got to go to the NFL Commisioner's party, which was held in Ft. Lauderdale.  Besides our bus driver getting LOST on the way there, it was a great party!!  It really was a lot of fun!  I didn't bring my big camera (I was in a cocktail dress, and Ryan was wearing a suit, so I just brought the little one ;)), so my pics aren't that great:

The Pointer Sisters were the entertainment and they were awesome!  I coudln't believe it was actually them, since they looked really young!

I wish I had gotten more pics of the food, it was great!  They had tons of mini stations set up throughout with different regions food (New York was a deli with sandwiches and Coney Dogs, Japen had sushi, and then there was Mexican, Cuban, Indian, etc....TONS of food!)

On Saturday, the Scouts and their families met down at our pool area, for some relaxing fun! 

Ryan and the some of the other Scouts (a few are missing from this pic):

Ryan & I:

(again, it was WINDY between the buildings--and I quickly put my jacket back on after this pic!)

Don't get me wrong, I loved the weather in miami, but 80 degrees there seemed a lot cooler than here! (I was wrapped up in a towel about 2 seconds after I took this pic ;))

 

Late Saturday afternoon, we headed down to South Beach to walk around and eat.

I was not really a fan of SB...we couldn't really find anywhere nice to eat, so we ended up coming back to eat!  But there were a few neat things over there:

(football sculptures: I LOVED the Saints one, of course)

We actually ordered room service and rented a movie in the hotel Saturday night, since we knew Sunday was going to be a LONG day!!  It was great!!

Game day Morning

superbowl tickets:

A few hours before the game, there was a family/friends tailgate!  It was a lot of fun!  Sadly Ryan deleted most of the pictures that I took of it :(  I can't be too mad, since I forgot to get a larger memory card and he DID take my camera down to the field post-game to get pics for me! But here is the ONE that he didn't delete!

After the tailgate, we boarded 38!!! buses and headed to the stadium...the seperated us into 2 groups, and we were the lead bus in the 2nd group, so we were in a police escorted convoy of about 15 buses.  The escort could only take us to the stadium exit then they were not allowed to escort us any further.  So we get to the first stadium exit and traffic is backed up...our driver (which was the lead bus driver--since we were bus #1) gets on his cell phone with someone and we get back out of traffic on the interstate and proceed to the next exit...driver is still on phone at this point and everything seems a bit confused!  We hear him yelling about what exit to take and it looks like we're taking the last stadium exit when he quickly swerves the bus back onto the interstate (I seriously thought we were going to tip over and crash!!).  Yep, you guessed it that was supposed to be the exit we were taking!! So we end up driving about 20 more minutes NORTH away from the stadium, and ended up in Hollywood, FL.  We ended up being so lucky that all the Scouts were on our bus, and one of the Scouts actually LIVES in Miami!  He actually had to go sit in the front with the bus driver and get us back to the stadium!!  Needless to say it was an adventure!  But it was all worth it when we got to the stadium (finally--we just took a 45 min detour!):