May I beg your indulgence for a moment while I rant?
I guess this is how life works now, but it still rankles:
We live in Florida, so we throught it would be good to get in on the Final Four by booking a hotel in advance and getting tickets when they became available. I signed up for the NCAA presale and used points to book three nights in a hotel in Tampa. So far, so good.
NCAA notified me tickets were on sale. I went in and there were a not-very-large number available, but I could not figure out how to get ADA tickets (my wife is disabled), and by the time I reached out to the arena managers and NCAA, tickets were gone. And in any case, two tickets to the semis and final would have set us back at least $900 for cheap seats. That nunber went up to $1,100 or so from a scalper, again for lousy seats.
Enough! We bought two tickets in Birmingham for a total of $300 for ALL the games. It's a risk, because there are scenarios where UConn could end up in Spokane (and we are absolutely not flying to Spokane under any circumstances), so we could be watching the wrong games, biut that seems unlikely. I will undo the Tampa hotel reservation and reserve in Birmingham. Then there's flying in to Birmingham, Atlanta, Huntsville or Montgomery, whichever looks best and is on sale.
So I am somewhat disgruntled about the amazing cost of Final Four tickets now (I probably should be angry at Catlin Clark), but I'm semi-retired and now willing to pay exorbitant amounts for those seats. Sigh.
'
On a positive note, does anyone know anything about Birmingham and what one can do there for a few days? Looks like they have a zoo (always fun) and the Civil Rights Museum and history trail (well worth doing), but I don't know what else.
OK, I;ll be quiet now. Thank you.