Week Seven - Notre Dame | Tour Guy Road Notes

I'll be honest, I've never really liked Notre Dame. I don't like the fact that they're independent, have their own TV deal, and have their own rules for getting into BCS games over teams with better resumes. I've always been annoyed by the general arrogance of Notre Dame feeling they were above the fray. That said, I couldn't have been more excited to actually go to South Bend and take in the undeniable history and environment of game day at Notre Dame. Let's roll (Catholic-style):

We stayed in beautiful La Grange, IL, near Midway Airport and made the under two hour drive the morning of the game. Highlights of the drive included, oh wait, there were no highlights. Lots of overcast skies, a Steak and Shake or two, and shotgunning a Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Here's to hoping next week's episode is called "Steak and Shake and Dunkin' Donuts present The College Football Tour Guy."

This car was probably driving a couple hours to Iowa City for an Illinois-Iowa game that ended with a score of 10-6. Luckily, there's a conference network broadcasting this garbage football to millions and millions of people.

We were going for the whole "pose like the mascot" look, but all it seems to convey is that I have the capability of making weird squinty-eyes and appear to have shaved MC Hammer lines into the side of my head (I did not).

This little guy is unaffiliated with the school or the country of Ireland, but managed to both weird me out and make me strangely happy all at the same time.

For whatever reason, we saw a lot of police on horseback. You've got to figure there's been a "Half Baked" situation with horses around so much food. I'm not sure, but I think horse-cop #2 is giving me the stinkeye for shooting him in stunning 4.1 megapixels.

More tailgating, this by the stadium. At first, we somehow couldn't find the stadium on campus, despite the tens of thousands of people migrating in a similar direction. Admittedly, I was all off, that Dunkin' Donuts destroyed me.

See it's a cross street and it's named "Holy Cross!" God, I'm lame.

The Golden Dome in the middle of campus. Nothing much I can say - walking around the Notre Dame campus makes you want to look into how to immediately become a brochure photographer.

The Goodyear Blimp, obviously present to see what kind of bad dancing I'd be subjecting my billions of viewers to this week. Predictably, I went with terrible jig-ish movement.

We couldn't avoid this sign, probably for good reason.

Touchdown Jesus. For whatever reason, we found a small statue of Jesus and thought that was TJ, but when we asked, we were met with a simple, "Uhh, no." This is why.