This is my first time to the Clemson campus, and I didn't know what to expect. Having been once, I'll gladly look for an excuse to come back.

I drove down from Nashville yesterday, which took a little over five hours. My first thought was that the town was in the middle of NOWHERE, which is true. But once you get here and take a look around, the town and the campus are beautiful.

Let's start with Lake Harwell, which rests on the edge of town. It's one of the prettiest lakes I've ever been around--clear water, lots of docks and lake houses, and the locals evidently take advantage of it.

I drove around town for a while this morning, hitting the strip near campus where there are no less than four Clemson souvenir shops along with the requisite restaurants, ice cream parlors, beauty salons, and the like. I parked my car on the street and walked further away from the scene, where I came upon a park that went back into a woods. I walked a while, then one of the deck-like sidewalks wound me into a pretty cove of the lake, where I stopped to take a few photos.

On the way towards campus, I ducked back into a couple of winding roads that ran into the woods. It was a residential area with some moderately-nice houses tucked back into the woods, large front porches at the front of some. It would be hard to imagine a better place to have a house.

The campus itself is also very nice--at least, the parts I've been able to see. I wandered around the football field for a bit, where Clemson has just built some brand-new luxury suites at the back of the closed-in end zone.

At that point, I headed to the baseball complex. Tickets were sold out,and a Clemson grad I ran into said that he'd paid $30 for a seat a couple hours before the game. The field itself is beautiful. There's no warning track here, as the outfield slopes up as it nears the fence. About half the outfield fence is chain-link fencing, where fans can sit behind the wall and peer through it from lawy chairs. There's a deck out in right where fans sit under umbrellas, and a small bleacher-like creation in right-center where a few dozen more fans sit.

The concourse, which I would say seats about 3-3,500, is packed. Along the left-field line, fans sit in bleachers behind the visitor's bullpen, which lies between those bleachers and a fence separating it from the field. An overhang covers approximately 20% of the crowd, and a large two-tiered press box lies at the back behind home plate. It's so full that they've stationed me in what's a glorified barstool just next to the box. Fortunately, I do have access to the wireless network and an electrical outlet.

The fans here are incredible.... passionate, loud, and early to arrive to the park. It's easy to see why Clemson is a perennial contender for Omaha.

Also, I got to take in dinner at the famed Esso Club, named because it evidently took over an abandoned Esso gas station. The place exactly like the run-down, abandoned service station it is from the outside, and absolutely zero work has been done to spruce it up. Inside, it's the typical college dive, but the food was decent and I enjoyed watching the Alabama-UNC game while briefly meeting Mickey Plyler, a local sports talk show host whose show I'd been on many times but never met, and Sanford Ware, a former Vanderbilt football player I'd seen play in Nashville a few dozen times but had also never met.

It's been a memorable trip so far. Let's see if the baseball can match yesterday's excitement and the overall experience of my trip so far.