Thursday, November 05, 2009

First regular season home game



I was perusing my card for my camera today picking out "turkey leg" pictures for the school...don't ask, it's a carnival thing for the school. (But it sounds fun, doesn't it?) Anyway, I realized I never blogged about the first official Cowboy game at the new Stadium, or other things that I will blog about later.

Meanwhile, we got "party passes" to go to the first "official" Cowboy game at the new stadium. Party pass means you can go into the stadium and you can eat, drink, cheer and in all other ways soak up the atmosphere in the stadium, you just don't have a place to sit your hiney down. But, you can also say "I was there when..." so there.

On our way to the stadium, we saw the motorcade with President George W. Bush, but didn't know he was even coming to the game. But, of course he would be, this was the biggest event since...well, heck I don't know. I just know in my neck of the woods, it was a BIG event. Sadie's the one who said who was in the black SUV, not the van in the picture but the SUV behind the van. I took a picture just in case it really was him. Sure enough, he was there - more to come on that later.





Here's Conrad and the girls with Tom Landry standing on Conrad's head. Well, really, they're outside the stadium.















After we got "in" ("in" meaning not actually in the stadium but only "on" the grounds) the doors on either end started opening up as did the roof. It was pretty cool. That's a picture of everybody already "really in" the stadium.














Well, I just lost a picture of Conrad and the girls lounging on these lovely leather sofas outside the stadium. Very plush.

This is the only time I actually saw the field with my eyes. This usher invited me to look out of this balcony. If you are any kind of a Cowboy fan, you know something is missing from this field...can you tell? Where is the star??? Those men in the middle of the field must be wondering the same thing...






Oh no, they were guarding where the star would eventually be revealed! Ta-da!














And, how can you go to a Cowboy game without taking at least one picture of the cheerleaders. How about this for angle?













Oh, and remember I said George W. Bush was at the game? Well, not just George, but Laura too! They did the coin toss! How exciting was that? I had no idea (other than Sadie screaming at me that "that was George Bush in that SUV!!") that he would be there. Very exciting.
















More George and Laura...



















Then Jordan Sparks (past winner of American Idol) sang the National Anthem. Pretty cool.















I totally expected a flyover of huge proportions and so I snapped away at that open roof and man, nothing. Nothing at all. Nada, zip, poof, nothing. But, I got a picture of that nothing so you have to look at that, too.














Conrad and the girls left right before half-time and I stayed to usher in Jon Michel and his friends using the party pass as an actual "pass" as in Conrad passed it them. Hey, Jerry (as in Jones) is the one who told Conrad to do it, not personally, but in some article or something he said he envisioned people coming taking a look around and then passing the pass to someone else and letting them take a look around. So, that's just what we did.

During half-time they unveiled the Ring of Honor. The picture at right shows the Triumvirate of Smith, Aikman and Irving. How cool to see all three of them in the same place. I got a picture - thanks to the big screen.






Got this one of Staubach the same way. Awesome!













All in all, I think it's something we will all remember at least for a long time, if not, for the rest of our lives. The girls will be able to look back at this when they're ready to demolish this behemoth and say "I was there the first regular season game that was played there". They'll talk to them on TV and the girls will regale them with stories of how we lived 2 blocks away when they built this big ol' thing and how we went to several events there the first year there and however many we go to from here on out. And Anna will tell them how she didn't want to go to anything there because she thought as soon as she walked in she'd get a nosebleed because everytime we'd drive by we'd say "well, there's the nosebleed seats". Oh how everyone will laugh!

It's been enjoyable being a small part of history. Hopefully they'll buy us out soon and we can move somewhere new and start new memories in a new place. One can hope...