the grove!

oh how i miss oxford and the grove! i went up last weekend for the ole miss/samford game. my sister graduated from samford, so she invited some of her friends to share a tent with us. i went up early on friday to set up the tent. it is way more intense than i ever could imagine! i stayed with a good friend of mine, emily moore. emily is awesome beyond words and agreed to help me with the tent. she should have said no.

emily called some of her friends to figure out the strategy. i don't think people took us seriously that two girls were setting up a tent. we found out that they moved the set-up time to 7 pm instead of the old time of 3 am. i was ecstatic! we heard that people start getting there at 5...we found that out at 4:45. awesome.
we pull up and there were some guys we knew setting up their 16 tents ready to run with them when they got the go-ahead. we unloaded our poor little tent and waited. we had no clue what we were waiting for. the cobra guy told us that when everyone started running that was our cue.
he was right. everyone started running towards the walk of champions and we ran for the spot across from the law school. we were able to get on the edge...probably taking someone's spot, but oh well.
we had a great spot and it was easy for everyone to find the next day. it was so great to be back in the grove in our own tent! i hung some lanterns to try to spruce it up a bit...





















ok...so it's kind of a redneck tent, but we had fun!

not much has changed about the grove except for the police patrolling. don't get me wrong...they patrolled when i was in college, but not to this extent. emily and i got there early enough to watch the police go to unmanned tents and go through all the coolers. if they found a cooler with beer they would drag it over to the garbage, individually open each beer and pour it out. you know that internally they had to have a conflict of interest. here is a pic of them pouring out the beer.




















my sister brought her whole family. her kids were making friends with everyone around. alex would make things with sticks and try to sell them to drunk people....absolutely hilarious to watch! molly would make sure everyone took a picture of her and her siblings. there are probably more than a few people out there who woke up the next morning wondering why there were pictures of small children on their camera! go to my sister's blog...she has cuter pictures of the kids. her is one of them with baby richard. richard is bink's baby...my sister's best friend.