Plenty of Minnesota fans are already in Orlando for the Citrus Bowl. They took a modern invention called the air-plane, and a few magical hours (and several hundreds of dollars) later they had been transported from the tundra to the sunshine.
That's the easy way. It also doesn't provide for much of a story. The hard way, the memorable way, the cheap way: make the 24-hour drive from the Twin Cities to Orlando. That's what Mike Linnemann and his friends decided to do. Here is his first dispatch from their adventure:
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I'm Mike Linnemann. While I worked for a stint at the Star Tribune office in college and used to be a Gopher trackster, I'm headed to Orlando, right now, for the bowl game vs. some team that cannot understand how to spell their state's name. I figured someone might want to hear about our journey. We're playing against a team that has something to do with a zoo.
I've had a bucket list item to attend an actual legitimate bowl game since I joined college, promising a childhood friend and fellow Eagle Scout, Brent Oja, who was a football manager at the time. He went to a few with Kool Aid Maroney and spoke of late night stories and super action fun times during late December. During this past Gopher tackle football season, I called Brent often and mentioned a bowl game idea but his doctorate plans interfered and I sat without a partner. I talked to my wife, but as she'll be in Las Vegas for the first time, for over 72 hours days after the bowl game, and she was out, too.
I found two college buddies, one of whom was an immediate yes and the other, who was dependent on driving as a cost-saving measure. As I've driven to Boston with my then girlfriend, now wife, and countless trips with parents as teachers during the summers, AND gas being cheaper than a bag of Goldfish Crackers, a drive was in order.
We decided to drive through St. Louis and Hotlanta on the way down, and perhaps a selfie with Elvis and a quick trip to a Big Ten school on the way back. Both trips are twenty-four straight hours.
This is an update, until now with things learned already:
