SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WNDU) – At a time when the city is ordinarily awash in holiday lights, South Bend is illuminated with playoff lights.
We’re less than a day away from the College Football Playoff matchup between Notre Dame and Indiana, and there’s lots of green downtown.
There are countless places around town with lights and decorations up, but a big destination spot is the local hotels. Over at the Aloft Hotel on Main Street, they are completely booked up for the weekend, and guests are given a nice warm, Irish welcome.
Now Aloft typically welcomes fans for Notre Dame home games, but this game, of course, looks different. This time around, the hotel has koozies for your cold drinks, pom-poms and big green shamrock balloons.
Esmeralda Cervantes, the front desk supervisor at Aloft, says the energy has been high recently with fans coming in for the game, no matter who they’re cheering for.
“There’s no dull time. As soon as they’re hitting the door, you’re already feeding off the energy that you’re coming in from,” Cervantes says. “It doesn’t matter what team they’re going up against, or what they’re going for, everyone kind of comes in unity, everyone celebrates and has the same emotion during those times.”
When it comes to people flying or driving in, staying at the hotel, Cervantes says most of the crowd is expected to be here before game day.
“We’re actually expecting for them to come in today. A lot of them are coming in today,” she says. “There’s a couple of individuals that will come in tomorrow, they actually want to get early, check in, so we’ll kind of see how that’s going but for the most part they’re all arriving today.”
The Aloft Hotel has bus route information for incoming fans, but this bus information is different for this rare Friday night home game.
For the free “Game Day Express” bus, the first stop is right at Aloft Hotel, then the Century Center, the DoubleTree, followed by the final destination: McKenna Hall on Notre Dame’s campus.
If you’re heading to the big game, you’ll find just about everything you need to know about parking, tailgating and stadium policies by clicking here.
For more information on busing, click here. And if you’re looking for traffic tips, click here.
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