Purple Fever!

This is a little delayed...but aren't all my posts? Either way, I'm SO excited for the Ravens and all of Baltimore! The game Sunday was absolutely amazing! What a way to end a season for the Ravens and a career for Ray Lewis! 

There was a parade on Tuesday to welcome the team back home and to celebrate a big win. We caught purple fever with everyone else and decided to take the day off to head into the city. We took the light rail into the city because traffic was awful. All the stadium lots were free to park in, but they were ALL full within an hour or so of opening. I'm SO glad we didn't count on that. Our stop was one of the very first, and I'm extremely thankful for that. We only waited in line about 10 minutes for tickets then we were able to make it on the first train through. I know someone who waited at the next stop for 45 minutes just to buy tickets, then the first 3 trains were full from the previous stops! That's CRAZY! 

Once we got into the city, we decided to watch the parade from the street rather than going into the stadium, that way we could beat most of the crowd to lunch after the parade. We found our spot at Camden Yards (where the parade route ended) and waited about...2 hours. It. Was. COLD! Maybe an hour before parade reached us, a helecopter flew over and announced that the stadium was filled to capacity. We thought this meant that there were about 71,000 people inside. We learned later that is was closer to 100,000! That's a LOT of people, especially when they were expecting around 30,000. People were PACKED into the aisles, on the field, all over the place. 

This is a random pic I found online, but I had to share anyway. There were people climbing up to the second level of the stadium to get in! 

From our spot just outside the Warehouse.

 Thanks for the photo bomb John!

Take 2...I like this one better anyway :-)

 The marching Ravens! 

Of course Poe was there

Not the greatest pic, but it is the greatest Harbaugh! 

Yay Flacco!

Ray Rice

Ed Reed with his little one

Ngata!

T-Suggs filming the crowd

And finally...Ray Lewis!

We started making our way to Federal Hill for lunch right after Ray Lewis passed by us.

Champs!

 We saw SO many people on the way...

...apparently they didn't get the memo that the stadium was full.

We went to get lunch right after the parade. We made it to The Abbey (one of our favorite places to go for burgers) in time to watch the festivities on TV. It would have been great to see it from the stadium, but it was nice to not have the crowd around. All in all, we were glad we chose not to go to the stadium. We ended up staying in the city until about 5:30 because of the line at the light rail. 

We had a great time celebrating a big Ravens win! Hopefully we can do it again before we leave here :-).