all sport saturday - stop 2, the bridgestone invitational pga golf tournament

i know that when you think of a fun place for four, young, tired kids to spend the afternoon, a "professional golf tournament" is your first choice, right? but that is just what we did!

we stopped home after the grande parade to have lunch, get hats and sunglasses and slather on the sunscreen before heading over to the bridgestone invitational. matt had been given tickets through work and kids are free (because, again, who would want to bring a pack of children to a golf tournament).

oh, and snacks, drinks, activities are out of the question because no bags larger than 6" cube are allowed. so i only carried my cell phone.

the kids were really excited to ride the school buses the tournament used to get us from the public parking to the tournament. the two big boys had come with daddy last year, but it was a first time for the rest of us.

we had explained to the kids that they would have to whisper the whole time and when the officials' hands were raised they would have to freeze like a statue. and they did great! by the third hour, manning was getting a little over it and had to be kept farther from the action so that he could run around a little, but honestly, he couldn't have been expected to have even lasted a quarter of that time just watching people golf in silence.

madelyn and manning were enjoying laying in the cool, soft grass.

and we took lots and lots of silly pictures to fill the waiting.

photography is prohibited so i really couldn't take pictures of how close we got to some of the shots. we were next to one player who was in the rough - like two feet from his ball - and the kids were awesome! they were quiet and still for about 20 minutes while the rules official was called over to inspect the ground because the ball was sunk down so deep - they even questioned if anyone had stepped on it (it really was a horrible lay).

the blimp overhead.

as the kids got restless in hour four, we offered that they could have sweet frog on the way home. but only if they could keep from complaining until we were done (we followed matt kuchar through the back nine - matt played with/against him in high school). manning was penalized two toppings and maddux one before it was time to go. to my amazement, there were no complaints when we got to sweet frog and the losses were enforced.

all in all, a huge success! now to shower and head off to our last stop of the day... love.