My first SEC game.

As you might know, the University of Missouri recently moved to the Southeastern Conference. This means beginning in 2012, my school will be playing my brother's school, the University of Georgia, in the SEC East. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend my first Georgia game, which is also the second-to-last football game during which Georgia can be my favorite SEC team (because of course, beginning next season I'll have to root for my Tigers).

My sister, dad and I all flew into Atlanta on Friday night and drove out to Athens to start our Thanksgiving Break. (The school is much further from Atlanta than I had previously thought - almost 80 miles instead of a mere 45 minutes.) We picked my brother up bright and early the next day (bright and early for a college freshman, that is) and headed to Waffle House for breakfast. Kickoff was scheduled for 12:20, and we made it into the stadium only a few minutes late.

My brother, Michael, headed off to the student section while Abby, Dad and I headed up to our seats in the nosebleed section ... on level 600. I had heard Missouri would have to do a $40 million renovation to our stadium to be in the SEC, but I wasn't sure what that would entail. Now I'm wondering, maybe that entails building our stadium a few levels higher? These seats were insanely high. The stadium also seats well over 92,000 people, so I'm sure the seats have to built that high just to fit around the field. When my dad sent his girlfriend a picture of the field from our seats and joked about how awesome our view was, she texted back:

"Yeah, you and the Goodyear blimp."

As you can see from our view, my dad's girlfriend was pretty accurate.

I loved the pretty autumn colors outside the stadium.

I'm happy to say Georgia won, 19-10, despite the few obnoxious Kentucky fans that were heckling the crowd in our section and periodically announcing the score of the Kentucky basketball game, in which the Wildcats were faring a little better (wrong sport!). The game ended just in time for me to follow the Missouri vs. Texas Tech game on my phone while we went to dinner (more about that later), and I was able to watch our victorious end back at the hotel! We also watched Oregon lose to USC, so those few games combined with Oklahoma State's loss the night before made for one heck of a college football weekend and a great start to Thanksgiving break!

Unfortunately, we didn't quite leave ourselves enough time in the morning to attend an actual tailgate outside the stadium, so I can't cross that off my list yet. But, I can cross attending an SEC football game off #20. Whoop!