In a normal football season, Adriene and I make at least one trip to some place fun for an away game and spend the weekend there. This year our away game was Auburn and we didn’t stay overnight. So, we decided to make our “weekend away game” be right here in Atlanta for Homecoming. We booked a hotel across the freeway and lived like tourists in our own city. The result was a really fun weekend.
Friday we arrived at the hotel and walked across the bridge to Georgia Tech campus and watched The Mini 500. This race is a Georgia Tech tradition where all the Greek societies and clubs all race around Peters Parking deck on tricycles. While its pretty humorous to watch college guys and girls race around on tricycles, it’s actually a test of endurance and skill as it requires multiple racers on a team and requires pit stops to change the trike’s tires. Many of the tricycles can’t take the stress and break before the race ends. Many of the racers are too tired to stand at the end and some even collapse before the race is over! I was impressed to see that my fraternity won 1st place in the race!
Racers at the start of the Mini 500
After that, we visited the old fraternity house where brothers were burning the midnight oil to finish their entries for the Wreck Parade. Georgia Tech holds a traditional parade every year at Homecoming where organizations enter a “classic” (a restored antique car), a “fixed-body wreck” (a car decorated with wire and paper mache for the theme of the weekend), and a “contraption” (a car powered by some method other than the drive train) This year’s theme was “Nightmare on Techwood Drive”
It was good to see alumni there helping out. Old friends John Gideon and Ed Graham helped work on the contraption’s motor. More alumni arrived later in the night.
Working on the contraption
On Saturday morning, we arrived early on campus for the Wreck Parade. I always enjoy seeing the creativity and humor of Tech students. Our fraternity’s contraption was a hovercraft, and it almost worked! It was able to hover, but they never got the motor to produce enough force to move it forward. Some of the other clever contraptions included a waterwheel powered car (didn’t quite work) and an elegantly simple bicycle-powered contraption by Adriene’s sorority.
The contraption
The fixed body wreck.
After the parade, we visited Adriene’s sorority house where she saw many of her friends from her college days. The house has undergone a nice renovation as the study room has been converted to a very nice entertainment room and the study room has moved to a renovated basement room. We then walked over to my old fraternity house and visited with friends. It’s always good to reconnect with people and find out what they are doing now. As I’ve gotten older, it seems like there are so many “eras” of friends in my life as people move away and go off on seperate paths. I always enjoy catching up with so many different people and so many different stories.
Then it’s game time! Georgia Tech pulled out a nail-biter over Clemson 10-9. Overall, the weekend would have been a lot of fun, even if Tech didn’t win, but that was the icing on the cake. After the game, we enjoyed dinner with some good friends and then it was back to the hotel where we slept under an all-too-familar skyline, away from home at homecoming.