To wrap up my week of remembering my trip to Ann Arbor, I want to talk about exiting the stadium after the game.

So, this is a real bone of contention for me. The amount of time it takes at other stadiums I’ve been to is infuriatingly frustrating. I’ve watched Michigan play college football games at Indiana, Northwestern and Illinois to date. Each place seems harder than the other to get out of. Northwestern is so tough because it’s in a residential part of Evanston. The stadium literally sits in the middle of a neighborhood. So that means that you not only have to deal with the regular game traffic, you have to deal with the people who live there that go out on game day. The parking is also always a crapshoot. You either get “lucky” and find a spot near the stadium for anywhere from 50-75 dollars or you have to park miles and miles from the stadium and make the trek. Illinois has similar problems. Parking isn’t as bad, but more times than not, you still have a hike to the stadium. And that includes tail gate parking. Leaving that stadium is a nightmare. It is like the worst drivers in the world all coalesce in one spot and drive as slow as possible. This is also where most of the drivers think honking the horn will make you move faster. It won’t. There’s still a line of people in front of you no matter how much you honk. It takes forever to get out of that stadium parking lot too. If you get out in less than an hour you are a much, much better driver than I am.

The worst is Indiana though. I’ve been there 3 times and I swear they are still doing the same construction from my first visit. This construction makes it an absolute nightmare getting in and out. Last year my father even bought a parking spot and it still didn’t matter due to the construction. He had to let me out so I could make kickoff. He didn’t show up until the second quarter because of the traffic. They don’t seem to plan for bigger college teams. They treat every game like any other game. It’s so insanely nuts with traffic I fear for my dad’s life because how mad he gets. It makes him so angry. It’s just as bad trying to get out. No one follows the traffic directors and cones. They just do as they please. And for out of towners, it’s horrifying. There’s also some weird back woods you have to drive through to get there. The whole Bloomington, Indiana experience, as far as football games go, is a shit show.

None of this happened at Michigan. Parking was easy. The tailgaters were nice. Finding our spot was simple. Getting out of the stadium, remember, there were 110,000 plus people there, was a cinch. They closed off one way of the street, thus giving the drivers 6 lanes to exit. It was the ideal situation. They seem to understand what they’re doing in Ann Arbor as far as the parking and exiting goes for football games. It was just another added bonus to a great trip. It was awesome.

The University of Michigan, and the town of Ann Arbor rules.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast. The other great thing about Ann Arbor being a Big 10 football town, no one steals the stuff out of car. If only Madison Wisconsin could be like Ann Arbor.

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