Post Tailgate: Purdue

While this wasn’t our tailgate, I thought it would be nice to reflect on our time to West Lafayette Indiana. We decided to join the Den and piggy back on their plan to leave Cincinnati early on Saturday morning, watch the game, then stay Saturday night and leave Sunday. At 5AM I woke from bed, and questioned this life decision while crawling into the shower to wake up. Threw some clothes into a bag and met up with some brigade members to head to West Lafayette. The drive went super quick as we talked about football and other stuff the entire way. At the arrival of the hotel we cracked some beers and waited for our Uber/Lyft and took a 15 minute trip to the intramural lot. We found The Republic around 9:30 and had a great time talking tailgating and Bearcats football. Between the Den and The Republic it felt like a tailgating convention where we explored the trailer and got ideas on how to improve our own tailgate. Pretty drunk, we boarded an unfortunate Purdue
Shuttle and performed “down the drive” about 4 times on our way to the stadium. To be fair Madison provided the Purdue fans on the bus an opportunity to perform a cheer, but all they had was “CHOO CHOO”. At the arrival of the stadium I had to wait for Alyssa to arrive from Wisconsin to give her her ticket, and I was blessed with Madison’s presence as she asked EVERY SINGLE passing Purdue fan if they had even ridden a train before, and then would proceed to tell them how trains suck. I give Purdue credit, we only heard “What even is a Bearcat” once. I take credit away though because the only other retort we heard was “A train would destroy a Bearcat” which Madison cleverly countered with “IF A BEARCAT WAS STUPID ENOUGH TO GET ON THE TRACKS, WHICH IT ISN’T”. After a brief rain shower Alyssa arrived and we got to our seats in the makeshift student section at the bend in the shoe. The game was great, we even had a full grown Purdue fan screaming at us to sit down in front of his wife and two children while his stadium was probably like 60% full. Thats how you know you won the day. All in all the Purdue fans were great, and it was nothing like my trip to Pitt a few years ago. After singing the alma matter we headed back to the lot to grab our cooler and finished the contents back at our hotel before checking out Purdue’s bar scene. It was a great trip, and thanks to The Den/Madison and The Republic for planning the trip and giving us an awesome place to pre-game. There were a lot of Bearcat fans, and with a 2-0 record I can’t wait for Houston to visit on Thursday. Wear Black, Houston is trying to “Paint the Stadium Red” which is ironic because we are red and personally I think they should finish taking over their own city first (#HTownTakeOver?) before attempting to steal the Queen City.