BOONDOCKING!!!
The cold air, the ambient resonant noise made by hundreds of portable generators, the smell of diesel, campfires, and all sorts of food being prepared in grills and smokers… it can only mean one thing - tailgating. This trip takes us to Auburn University for the 2007 Univeristy of Alabama vs. Auburn University “Iron Bowl.” This being the last game of the regular season for both teams and the bitter rivalry between Alabama and Auburn makes for a great weekend of college football and camping experience.
Situated on either side of Donahue Drive and off Woodfield Drive are large open areas described on the map as game day parking. These fields this weekend were absolutely packed with every kind of 
camper and RV imagineable. Most of them were Auburn fans, the rest were mostly Alabama fans and folks like us that just like to camp and have a good time.
Fortunatley (or unfortunately, depending on how you want to look at it) this was the weekend Mother Nature decided to turn on the freezer and we ended up camping in 30-40 degree weather thanks to a cold front rolling through on Wednesday. It gave us a chance to use a fire pit and dust off the furnaces in our campers. It’s sort of a funny dynamic when the human body changes gears from wanting the temperature to be below 70 to keep cool into welcoming cozy 80 degree heat to get warmed up. While the fire pit functioned as a portable sun to warm one side 
of us, the side NOT facing the fire was still freezing.
Most of our group arrived on Wednesday to find the game day parking areas practically full. From what we learned later in the week, there are a lot of reserved places closer to the stadium for scholarship donors and other dignitaries which were opened up at 6AM Friday morning. The area across the road from us cleared to about half capacity at that point but soon filled up again as the day progressed. By early afternoon any space vacated by the exodus of the paying campers had been filled by many other game day parking area tailgaters like us. As night fell on Friday the party really began to roll as more people were making it in. Every now and then in the distance you would see someone driving around pulling a camper or pop-up trying to find a place to wedge themselves into the crowd. 
By Saturday morning, there was barely anywhere to walk in those fields much less park anything. As the day progressed the crowd got louder, the hum of generators and smell of everything under the sun being cooked filled the air. If there were 5,000 people in those fields there had to have been enough food being cooked to feed 20,000 people. Every sort of cooktop, smoker, and grille on earth was represented en mass. There were enough hamburgers and steaks being cooked to explain where the cattle that once roamed those fields went. Burgers, hot dogs, steaks, pork loin, chicken, sausage, in our case one night - lasagna, chips, cooked veggies, potatoes, corn, shrimp, (THANKS DOUG!) you name it — the food was there. Half the experience of camping is the cooking and eating and the more adult lemonade there is flowing, the more food is cooked. I think that’s the law whether you’re at a state park or in a cow field in Auburn, AL responsible for bringing your own power and water with you!
This trip was our first attempt a tailgating and it won’t be our last. We learned a lot about resource conservation (i.e. DON’T let all the kids on the trip play on your camper unless you remember to turn off the water pump) and how to plan for how much gasoline you’ll need to keep the generator running for the amount of time you’ll be staying. On this trip we ran through the 46 gallons of fresh water stored in the tanks a day and a half early. No biggie, we carried several gallons of filtered drinking water which more than carried us through the entire trip. The 
generator we used was a Titan-3800 which burned approximately 5 gallons of gasoline every 24 hours. This generator is great for cold weather boondocking but wouldn’t do very well when the air conditioner in the camper is running. I could basically power both TVs and the satellite receiver, the fan for the furnace, the refrigerator, and some lights. If the microwave was needed, something else had to be turned off temporarily. The final “roughing it” breakaway towards reality was when one of our neighbors asked if they could hang a white sheet on the back of our camper to use as a screen for their projector. It just doesn’t get any better than this! Cold, drinking, full to the throat of food and watching a football game with a projector out in the middle of a cow field!
In closing, the trip was a blast from start to finish. Being amongst family and friends in a event like this is great - we expected that. What we didn’t expect and were pleasantly surprised to find was that most everyone there was great to be around also. If you’ve got the gear to do it and have never tailgated a sporting event or anything else of that nature I highly encourage you to try it out. We always knew it would be fun but are 100% believers now!
At a bowling birthday part this past weekend I snapped a few shots of some other people bowling while not pointing the camera at the kids. The photo in this entry was a strike and to be honest, it was the only of about 20 shots where I caught the crash just right with the pins flying in every direction. There were a few more shots later in that game of spares and others without the pins flying, this one I liked the best. 
