Madness

Everybody that is coming to town for Super Bowl is here. The downtown area was pure madness yesterday. We started our shift at the NFL Experience on time shortly before 9 AM and with the exception of about a 20 minute break to have a couple slices of pizza that were brought in, we worked non-stop until 5 PM. Josie and I each figured we did around $30K worth of business at our registers alone, with another shift following us. One of the Aramark manager's came by at about 3 PM and took a stack of 100 dollar bills from each of our registers. There were 16 registers covered during the day even though the line move steadily all day, it was almost a 1 hour wait to get waited on.

We were very happy to end our day and the madness became even more evident when we left the building to walk to the Light Rail to catch our ride home. The line to get into the NFL Experience was two blocks long! It wrapped around the entire Convention Center. This is what the line looked like as we exited the building:

The walk from the Convention Center to the train stop took forever. There were so many people on the streets in this part of town that we actually had to wait for people to clear at some of the street crossings. There were the usual protesters and bible toting extremists:

and just plain sightseers and folks having a grand time:

We eventually made it to the train stop where the Phoenix Metro line had placed extra cars into service - 6 on each train versus the normal 3 cars - and the number of trains were tripled to where a train arrived every 5 to 8 minutes instead of about 20 minutes. The crowds were surrounding the station:

 

We guess that the ratio of Seattle fans to New England fans was probably 15-1. There was every imaginable piece of Seahawks apparel that people were wearing:

We saw several people that we knew during the day- including our personal Physician, Dr Sodhi from Surprise who was there with his son - and a fan from Bellevue WA that we rode the train and chatted with on the ride into work who was only coming in to pick up his Super Bowl Tickets but got caught up in the excitement.

It is finally here - Super Bowl Day - and we are scrambling to get ready to leave at 6:45 AM to meet the group that is working the game at the Coliseum in Phoenix. We will get checked in through security there, get our Super Bowl Uniforms and ride a shuttle to the stadium.

Enjoy the game everybody.

G O   S E A H A W K S !!!