Tampa, Florida, is hosting the Super Bowl this year, which means lots of celebrations, fun, and excitement! We headed to Tampa on Friday night to check out the Super Bowl. There was a lot to celebrate with the Bucs being the first team to host and play the Super Bowl game in their home stadium. The excitement was so contagious!
Super Bowl Experience
The Super Bowl Experience is a really fun event put on by the NFL and the Host Committee. It is an interactive football theme park with opportunities to virtually “meet” NFL players, play games, and shop merchandise. While tickets were free, entrance was limited due to COVID and tickets sold out within minutes! We didn’t realize that tickets were required, so we missed out, but we definitely learned our lesson for next time!
Things to Do
Even though we were unable to grab our tickets to the Super Bowl experience, we found plenty of ways to celebrate! Curtis Hixon Park offered a free celebration, no tickets required (though the NFL OnePass app was required for entry). This event offered photo ops, food and drink vendors, live entertainment, and more.
There were fireworks shot off Friday and Saturday nights the week of the Super Bowl as well as the week before once per hour for four hours. The show was around 5 minutes long and it was very well done. And huge bonus, the fireworks were shot off from the Gasparilla Boat!
We watched the fireworks from the Sail Plaza. This wasn’t originally our intent, we’d actually planned to watch from the park, but when we got there, the line to enter was really long and we didn’t think we’d be able to get through the entrance in time. This kind of worked out for us because the streets were busy with excitement which was so contagious. We really enjoyed the walk through downtown and just being in Tampa was an experience.
After the fireworks, we headed back towards Curtis Hixon Park. We were hoping that the line was shorter, and it was. But unfortunately it was shorter because they were no longer allowing entrance (ha!) It turned out to be perfect timing, however, because right as we were approaching, a second firework show started! We had no idea this second show was planned and I’ll never forget how happy I was standing underneath the fireworks, in Tampa during Super Bowl weekend. It was magical.
