An RV Road Trip for High School Football in New Orleans and LSU-Alabama at Bryant-Denny

This past weekend I was lucky enough to tag along with four friends who rented an RV in Houston, drove to New Orleans for a night, and then headed to Tuscaloosa for the LSU-Alabama game. In no particular order, here’s what stood out about the trip.

1) The Alabama experience in and of itself was little bit disappointing. A large percentage of that is attributable to the weather as opposed to anything that was necessarily wrong with the city or the fans. All week rain was in the forecast. Being hubristic, I just kept telling myself that this wasn’t going to happen. It was gonna be 75 and sunny, like it always is when I travel, and everything would be wonderful. Lo and behold, it was cold and rainy until right before kickoff, when it was merely cold and windy.

I’m not one who withers in bad weather. I’ll go to Lambeau in January, bundle myself up, and have zero issues. However, I was totally unprepared for this. My socks and cotton sweatshirt got soaked and stayed that way. Again: This is on me more than the facilities or environment in Tuscaloosa, but it definitely contributed to my level of enjoyment that day.  The Quad, which is the big tailgate area by Bryant-Denny Stadium, was a muddy mess. I have no way of verifying this, but my suspicion is that this caused individual party tents to be more insular, as opposed to a major communal experience like I’ve seen at LSU.

3) It was a buyer’s market on Saturday. There were sooooo many sellers. Presumably this had to do with the weather as opposed to complacency with the dynastic football stadium, but if you were willing to hold out until near kickoff, you probably could’ve gotten into the game for about half of face value. The stadium itself was great, and had tremendous energy, but we were sitting up top where the noise wasn’t as palpable. In construction, Bryant-Denny reminds me a lot of the Horseshoe in Columbus.

4) It also didn’t help the experience that the game was an utter squash. Yeah, it was close at halftime, but there was never any time where one reasonably felt LSU had a chance. Alabama’s defensive line is just ferocious. I’ll acknowledge that I don’t follow college football very closely — my beats here primarily consist of NFL, sports media, and WWE — but that felt like a unit where we’ll be looking back in five years and realizing that everybody who was there became a pro bowler. Leonard Fournette, who will be formidable on Sundays, was just swallowed up. He never had anywhere to go. By the opposite token, Alabama’s offensive line was creating gaps for Derrick Henry, who has a combination of size, speed, and strength that is hard to believe.

5) Tuscaloosa doesn’t have Uber or Lyft, which is basically a war crime in this day and age, and a lot of the streets don’t have sidewalks. Getting around was a bit of a challenge, especially given the weather conditions. There’s not much more to say about this other than to reiterate that it’s not the best town on Earth in terms of tourist accessibility.

6) New Orleans, on the other hand, remains the undisputed champion of where in the world I want to spend one night. Uber drivers not only were alright with open containers in the vehicle, they were taken aback by our asking for permission. We started out the evening there by going to a high school football game between West Jefferson and Landry-Walker. The contest featured perhaps a dozen or more future Division I players, including LSU receiver commit Devonta Jason, a five-star recruit on 247. The game itself had a lot of really impressive individual efforts in the form of speed and hard hits, but lacked cohesive flow. There was a half-hour stretch where it felt like there was a flag on every play. The crowd was about 98% African-American, and it was really cool to experience an environment like this, which would not be possible up North. Though I wish we’d had time to also grab a sit-down dinner in the city, this game was worth missing out on that for.

After the game, we headed to the French Quarter. We bought a few beers at a convenience store, walked down Bourbon Street to Frenchmen, and wound up in Cafe Negril, where a reggae/funk band was playing jammy Bob Marley covers. I didn’t capture video of it, partially because I was, um, incapacitated. Beyond that, though, there’s no way to aptly recreate a crowd full of people 8+ drinks deep without a care in the world at that time and place, collectively enjoying an experience together. The whole city is just an oasis, and I already can’t wait to go back again.

7) Renting an RV was a really cool experience, which I’ve never done before. I don’t think I’d trust myself to drive that thing, though, and am glad my friends picked up the slack there. We probably had one or two more people than the vehicle comfortably sleeps. As with the weather, I was ill-prepared, not knowing that I needed a pillow and blanket, which resulted in a disastrous sleeping arrangement the first night where I slept upright and freezing in the shotgun seat. I’m not one-thousand percent certain that I’d prefer an RV to renting a car and piling into a hotel room, but it’s definitely something I’m glad I did at least once.