Citrus Bowl II - Tampa & Orlando

First off, let me just get this out of the way. I had heard before that the Orlando airport was the worst pickup/dropoff airport in the country. And with one pickup trip, I can assure you that this is the case.

Some airports are bad because of the layout of the terminals. The gates are hard to get to. The security lines are awful. The Orlando airport is terrible because of the layout of the roads (and the parking, and the rental car return, and the highways). They got all of that stuff completely wrong. And as they've grown – MCO now has the 7th-most flights of any airport in the United States – there's just nowhere for the cars to go.

(Believe it or not I studied some of this stuff in college so give me one paragraph to rant.)

It's designed to force single-lane merge after single-lane merge. And that creates absolute chaos. That photo above is my second single-lane merge and that was before we merged with all of the southbound traffic (three additional lanes) which had to then sort into arrivals, departures, and parking garage. Most of the cars are there for arrivals so that's three lanes of traffic all trying to merge into one. Once I finally got to the pickup lanes, the number of passengers standing there waiting was absolutely incredible. We're talking hundreds and hundreds (thousands?) of people standing and waiting for their loved ones to negotiate all of the single-lane merges. It's insanity.

Why am I telling you this? Because I have to go do it again in about an hour. This flight is our youngest son arriving from St. Louis. His flight has been delayed three hours, which would normally mean the traffic would subside, but now I'm gonna have to fight the "tens of thousands leaving Disney" traffic at 10:45 pm on a Saturday night. Odds that I would ever live in a place with this much tourism traffic: 1 in 500,000.

But I'm still happy to be here. And I'm still thrilled with our decision to fly in the whole family and rent this Airbnb. And I'm overjoyed when I see Illini gear all around town. And I can't stop asking my son "can you tell me that again?" when he talks about how much Illini gear he saw in the Orlando airport (and on the connecting flight from Denver to Orlando). THESE ARE THE DAYS.

If you're wondering why I got so bent out of shape at Illini fans claiming that a trip to the Citrus Bowl would be "meaningless" in this 12-team playoff world, it's all of this. I've been waiting FOR EV ER to go to Tampa and Orlando during the holidays. And now I get both of them in three years. The bowls were announced three weeks ago and I'm still giddy at the fact that we're in the Citrus Bowl.

I'll just list it out for you. When I was a junior in high school Illinois went to Orlando for the Citrus Bowl and when I was a senior in high school Illinois went to Tampa for what was then called the Hall Of Fame Bowl (it then changed to the Outback Bowl and is now the ReliaQuest Bowl). 1992 didn't have any Big Ten participants but here are the conference participants since 1993: