Rivalry #9

I love rivalry weekend.

Even though I started out the first part of the long Thanksgiving / rivalry weekend with a cold, I rallied in time for the Clemson vs Carolina game on Saturday. I was not going to miss this tailgate or this game.

Can you believe that this was our 9th Clemson vs Carolina game? It's hard to believe that we've been through 9 football seasons together... and yes, I definitely measure the length of our relationship by football seasons.

Can you also believe that we took my orange tent to tailgate with this weekend? It made directing friends to our tailgate so much easier since we were the only orange tent in sight in the State Fairgrounds lot.

It's exactly how this girl found our tailgate.



These people are some of my favorite, but we were missing the other two from our group. They'll get a pass for this game though since they were busy welcoming the littlest and newest member to our group :)

The picture below is brought to you by my uncle. He showed up to Thanksgiving with two things for me. The first was the "Don't Panic" FedEx button from sometime in the 1970s. The second was a six pack of River Rat's American Kölsch Story because he read this blog post... and took notes! Thanks, Addy!



And this picture is brought to you by 29 years of friendship. We may never actually plan on seeing each other ever, but we always run into each other anytime we're out and about around Columbia.

I was outnumbered at our tailgate for a majority of the day (things that happen when you tailgate in enemy territory) but these two showed up towards the end to try and help even out the numbers.

Game time!



We spent the first half of the game sitting in my dad's seats. After half, when the home team fans began their mass exodus out of the stadium, we moved down to the lower deck to watch the rest of the game with Patrick's dad in his seats.

Did I thoroughly enjoy our tailgate and the game this year? You bet. When Patrick and I first started dating, Carolina had just started their five-game winning streak. For the first five years that we were together... Carolina won. We're almost tied now.

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In the end... Clemson walked away with a 34-10 win (their 4th in a row over Carolina!) and we're moving on to bigger and better things: the ACC Championship. It's an unofficial play-in game for the CFP Playoffs this year as Clemson takes on Miami and I am SO excited that the game is back in Charlotte.

But I might be more excited about the fact that Clemson is back to being the #1 team in the country. Go Tigers!

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Hey Charlotte, we're coming for you!