We arrived ten full hours before kick-off of the home football game, but the parking lots were already filling up and tailgating had begun in earnest.
It's a lovely campus, and of course, we had to take the walk to the football stadium.
We knew better than to try to buy tickets for the game tonight, as it's between #8 Notre Dame and #7 Stanford. It will be a sold-out ball game. So we had to settle for a look around the outside of the stadium. We enjoyed several statues of famous Fighting Irishmen, including Coach Lou Holtz.
Another fun place to be on game day is Old Main, whose gold dome and staircases will rival many of the state capitols we have visited.
A game day tradition is for students to line these banisters and staircases before the game, and raise this old roof by singing the fight song together.
The church is the centerpiece of the campus, so we included it as the first picture at the top of the blog. The inside will also rival some of the prettiest cathedrals we have seen.
We were wishing for a few tunes from that impressive set of pipes from the church's pipe organ.
We were told to take the little path behind the church to experience "The Grotto" where some of the football fans were lighting candles and saying a prayer.
As we walked back to our parking lot, we could tell that this university has a nation-wide following. These four cars parked side-by-side came from California, Colorado, New York, and Texas. In the next row we took a picture of license plates from Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Idaho together.
After a nice long walk around campus, we drove the 15 miles to our next stop. Even though we've been in Indiana for the last several days, we will have to cross the state line back into Michigan for the Apple Festival in Niles. We got there just in time for the afternoon parade. It was nice to see they still spend some time decorating impressive floats for the apple festival.
We saw the queens, and the FFA, and the old tractors, and the bands, and the boy scouts . . . all the things that make for a good parade. But our favorite part of the parade was the special give-aways. Besides all the candy thrown from floats, we scored four apples handed out by parade walkers at the apple festival!
We went to the festival grounds for the craft booths, the tent filled with apple products, and the carnival. Throughout the afternoon we attended events like the log-cutting contest, and the mustache/beard judging. We were a little sad to miss the apple pie eating and seed popping contests that will be held on Sunday.
But the real reason we wanted to come was for the evening activities. We started out at the senior citizen dance. The DJ played some good two-step songs, and this group also does a lot of line dancing. You know you are at a senior citizen dance when the person next to you is line dancing with a cane.
After dancing for an hour and half and eating some great refreshments, we headed back to the festival grounds for the Chris Higbee concert. No, we hadn't heard of him before, but we were excited for the concert after we heard some of his stuff on Youtube.
We can now say that we're fans, as we were impressed with his singing and his fiddle playing. It really was a fun concert!
So we got a college game day tour, a fun festival, a free dance, and a concert--all in one day. By the end of the day we had collected a total of eight apples of different kinds and colors (we ate two just to make sure they were as tasty as they looked). It was a good day of wandering! Just like the varying colors of apples, we had a varying list of activities on this Saturday filled with a few of our favorite things.
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