Panthers Game Day Minus One

We are comfortably settled down here in Charlotte, NC.  Actually we are about 10 miles away which puts us in SC, but who wants to quibble.  We have tried the BBQ here and while quite good, it did not blow us away.  We have tried the fried chicken here at Prices Chicken Coop.   Prices is regarded as having the best fried chicken around.  Again, very good, but to be honest the chicken we had with the waffles at Maxine's in Indianapolis on the way down was better.  We went to try the signature dish of Charlotte, but apparently they didn't have one until 2012.  In 2012 they decided to have a contest to find the signature dish for the city and the BellyBun Sandwich, made of pork belly marinated in dark (local) beer and a variety of spices, and served on cheesy cornbread biscuit bread, rather than a traditional bun was selected.  Not because it was served anywhere, but because it seemed to have "Charlotte-ness," and it used local ingredients.  I believe it was added to the menu of a restaurant, the Harvest Moon Grille,  but to my thinking that does not qualify it as a signature dish for a city or a region.   

We drove over and checked out the stadium and it seems nice enough from the outside.  I will give you more details tomorrow after the Bears crush the Panthers.  Until then I will leave you with something to ponder.   Every time we have gone anywhere in the area we have run into Bears fans.  Sometimes many of them together.  We also have talked to a lot of people in the area who asked what we were in town for and when we said "The Game" they didn't understand or know who the Panthers were playing.   Many of them assumed we meant one of the college games.   If a town has that much apathy towards their football team, do they even deserve to have one?  Granted they have managed to sell out most of their games for many years, but at this moment there are still a couple of hundred seats left for sale on Ticketmaster.   About 1/2 of those are single seats, but there are blocks of 2, 3 and 4 seats together available.   By contrast there are 18 tickets available in total for all the remaining 6 home Bears games.  6 of those happen to be in 3 blocks of 2 and are all for the last home game.   All the rest are single seats.   And I doubt you could go into a dozen different places in Chicago and talk to 20 people between them and not have any of them know who the Bears were playing at home that weekend and if you were wearing the opposing teams Jersey not know what "Game" you were talking about if you said you were in for the game.   Maybe I am wrong.  I would need someone with a jersey for another team to test this theory.

Anyway, time to sign off - Go Bears