sunday

In all of the ipod madness and mayhem we didn't bother packing any cd's for the trip. Luckily Tampa has some pretty good classic rock stations. We decided to go cd shopping just in case. Unfortunately, we could not find a cd store. No Best Buy, no Circuit City, no local record store. Lakeland isn't very big so I figured we could keep looking but if we didn't find anything we could shop in Tampa.

The first game we saw was at 1:05 at Joker Marchant Stadium. The Tigers played the Mets. We had pretty good seats for the game and it was hot and sunny! Unfortunately, the dude sitting next to me was from Michigan and wore stinky wool socks with Birkenstocks. Yeah. Not sure he was from Michigan because I never talked to him, but I'm pretty sure only an asshole from Michigan would go out in 80 degree weather in that getup. He was with his son, not sure about that either but it was a younger guy, who was full of useless baseball facts that he insisted on sharing with dear ol' dad and since I was sitting two seats down, he shared them with me too. I learned things like, "Nomar Garciaparra is one of 5 players in MLB that do not want music played when they go to the plate to bat." SHUT THE FUCK UP! I couldn't take it anymore so we left our seats and went out to the lawn. It was so nice and breezy and beautiful and I couldn't hear those losers anymore!

Unfortunately we could not stay for the whole game because we needed to make sure we got to Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede by 5PM. That's right. You all read correctly. I had been wanting to go but was kind of wavering. For any of you that might be wavering, don't. You have to go. It was fanFUCKINGtastic!! Instead of giving you all the details, I will just mention highlights:

Australian guy in a costume with lightbulbs riding a horse in a costume with lightbulbs
buffalo
piggies
people riding ostriches
lots of horses
magic tricks
yankees and confederates
giant portrait of Dolly above the stairs
whole little chicken on my plate

Oh yeah. You have to go. Really. The only disappointing part was that cameras were not allowed.