Super Bowl Village People

Matt loves football, I'm generally fairly down with being a tourist (even though I DON'T love football), and the girls just get dragged wherever we go, so off we went to hang out at the 2012 Super Bowl Village, just up the road in Indianapolis, one day recently.

You get a welcome right up front--

--and ample driving directions downtown--

--which is a good thing, because just in case you were relying on turn-by-turn driving directions from Mapquest, you should know that some of the streets have been, um, festified:

There are a lot of activities downtown that cost money, but are also pretty cool--even I would have liked to go to the Super Bowl Experience to see the championship ring collection, and I DEFINITELY would have done the zip line--but it being Matt's day, and being that Matt's favorite thing to do in the world, other than watch football, is not spend money, we stuck entirely to the many free activities (okay, I would have bought a zip line ticket anyway, but they were all sold out for the day by the time we walked over there).

We posed:

We watched the ice sculptures being made:

We watched participants struggle through the Hundred-Yard Hamster Wheel, cheering them on with the cry, "Be the hamster! Be the hamster!":

And we goofed around on the football field set up just outside the stadium, just under the zip line with people passing hollering overhead every minute or so:

We didn't do everything, no, but we did pretty much all the free stuff, our Matt had a good time on his idea of the perfect budget, and we got away with plenty of time to hit the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and Trader Joe's.

Super Bowl Village, done and done!