We had a full day of Cowboys fun today. After a good, hot breakfast at the hotel, we had only a short wait to go to the first event--a tailgate party with Dallas Cowboys legends signing autographs.

We left the hotel to drive the 1.5 miles to the parking space I had booked and paid for in advance. The stadium had no parking left when I bought the tickets, but I booked a space through ParkWhiz.com at the TailGate Tavern. It's just north of the stadium and about a half mile from the Eddie Deen Crossroad Smokehouse restaurant where we went to the tailgate party. They allowed parking as early as six hours before the game and four hours after the game so I knew that would be plenty for us.

Once we were parked, we walked to the tailgate party. On the way over, we drove by it first to make sure we could find it easily when walking. We arrived only a few minutes after the start, but there were lots of people already there. When I bought the game tickets, I got a package that included this tailgate party with food and drinks. We picked up our game tickets from them, received a wrist band to wear at the party, and went in for the delicious barbecue buffet lunch. Drew Pearson and someone else younger we didn't know were signing autographs, but we did not stand in line for them. We just watched the action--there were games and contests going on from time to time and lots of people roaming around.

By 2:00 or so, we decided to head over to the stadium. It was just catty-corner across the street. Found the right gate to enter and got through the security screening pretty quickly. Inside was a crazy madhouse of thousands of people going every which way. We spotted our seats, but decided to look around for a while before sitting down. We had seats in the middle of the row with about ten people on each side to climb over every time we needed to come or go, so we decided to wait until we were ready to stay a long time before we sat down. The seats were great--fifth row in the second tier from the bottom in the end zone section 224. During the game, we saw several plays where the Cowboys ran straight toward us for touchdowns. It was so exciting to see up close.

Final score: Cowboys 42 and Colts 7. What a game! Also, Tony Romo beat the record to become the Cowboys all-time leading passer, and the team clinched the Division title putting them in the play-offs.

After the game, we walked back to the TailGate Tavern and ate dinner before joining the traffic. I thought that waiting an hour after the game to try to drive would be enough time, but it wasn't. The traffic was awful, complicated by two sections of construction that we had to go through. The GPS didn't take us the most direct way, and it took a long time to get back to the hotel.

It was a wonderful day though. Even the bad traffic couldn't spoil it.