Wildcat-palooza - Part 1

When Kentucky’s football season started with a huge blown loss to Southern Mississippi and then a blowout loss to Florida, I thought “Here we go again”. However, they actually won some games and won their sixth game over Austin Peay. This made them bowl eligible for this first time in six years. Their last game would against nationally ranked Louisville at Louisville. Given that plus with their Heisman trophy candidate Lamar Jackson, I thought Kentucky had no chance to win. All the bowl projections I saw seemed to agree with that and projected Kentucky to end up in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis.

Jonathan and Josh and I planned to go the bowl game. There was an interesting alignment of the date of the bowl game with Kentucky’s basketball schedule. Kentucky would play Mississippi in Oxford the night before the Liberty Bowl game. Oxford is about an hour’s drive from Memphis. Tickets for that game would go on sale the day before the Louisville game. I went ahead and bought three tickets right when they went on sale. In an unbelievable turn of events, Kentucky upset Louisville. This ultimately caused them to be chosen for a different bowl game – the TaxSlayer (formerly known as the Gator Bowl) in Jacksonville Florida. I loved the idea of a Florida bowl, but I wasn’t sure what we’d do now.

So, the boys and I started discussing our options. The trip to Jacksonville would end up being a multi-day trip. Jonathan decided he didn’t want to do that since he didn’t want to be away that long from his new daughter Lucy (which I totally understand). Josh and I batted around ideas and came with the idea for him to come home and then we would drive to Southaven Mississippi and stay and go to the game in Oxford. We ran all sorts of options on flights and found the cheapest option was to fly out of Nashville (non-stop) to Jacksonville on Southwest. I bought bowl game tickets (club seats!) and got decently priced flights.

We still had that extra ticket to the Ole Miss game though. I came up with the idea to invite my brother Kevin. He lives in the Memphis area plus it’d been a while since we’d seen him so I invited him along. He was able to go with us, so the “Wildcat-palooza” was all set up and ready to go. In my next post, I’ll let you know how part one of the trip transpired.