Short football season for us

We always look forward to Duck football season as it means good times visiting with friends we don't see all year long.

This year was extra-special as Skot, Kendra and Jaxen were in Oregon. They stayed with us in Armitage Park, so were able to visit with old friends at an afternoon BBQ on Friday, and come to the game with us on Saturday

They visited the Moshofsky Center and experienced all the hustle and bustle and pregame excitement.

Photo ops abound in the Center, and if you're quick enough you might even catch the Duck himself!

While we toured the Center and the Stadium grounds, Steve hung out at the tailgate with the dance team.

 

This was little Jax's first football game, and he really seemed to enjoy the crowd and the excitement, and he was exceptionally tolerant of his hearing protectors!

This year has been a shorter than usual football season for us. The Duck's first four games were all home games, with the last being a conference game, so we planned on attending all of those. By the time the last game rolled around we were both under the weather with a really bad cold. A 7:30 p.m. kickoff and drizzling rain didn't sound like a good place to be, so we watched the Ducks whip Arizona on TV, Kleenex box and cough syrup at the ready.

Simply wandering through the campground was almost as good as being at Autzen. So many of the campers at Armitage are Duck fans, there are flags, pompoms, and some amazing customized rigs.

We've see a lot of unique tailgate vehicles over the years. Some are built from scratch, some are conversions, reconstructions, whatever you want to call therm... some very clever people put their skills to work in creating these marvels. The latest we've come across was a shiny little trailer that passed our site as it pulled into the campground late one Friday night. We're accustomed to Airstreams and a few other makes being chrome finished, but never a model like this.

The young couple it belongs to, Dirk and Stacy, said they spent about a year and a half on the restoration. It was quite a wreck when they bought it. They intended to repaint the outside, but while standing in the auto-body shop looking at it a passer-by stopped and said he could help them rub it down to bare metal, so they took him up on the offer and this is the result. The interior wood is all original, and the graphic on side covers the outline of a portion of the paint that they weren't able to remove. Pretty classy little party rig!

There were a few other custom tailgate vehicles in the lot this year that we hadn't seen before, like this Autzen Fire Department truck.

And during pre-game and half-time we do enjoy a bit of  people-watching. Darth Duck is a regular, and there are always other Duckwear fashionistas to admire.

Somewhat recovered from the worst of our germs, we're creeping our way out of Oregon, heading for home, via Utah.