Well Hawkeye fans, bowl season is finally here, and your team is headed to sunny San Diego this year.
If the opportunity to leave the bitter cold and head to California for a few days is too good to pass up, you can join them a few different ways:
The No. 16 Hawkeyes (9-3) are in the Holiday Bowl this year facing No. 22 USC (8-4) on December 27.
On Google Flights, the cheapest round-trip from Des Moines to San Diego from the day before the game to the day after (December 26-28) is a little over $800 (as of Monday afternoon).
You could get a pretty good price on hotels out there if you book soon, though. Looking on Kayak, the you can get a room in the San Diego area for as low as $52 per night.
Tickets for the game itself are relatively cheap, at least for now. As of 3:00 p.m. on December 9, plaza-level seats looking toward the south end zone are sitting at $61, while some of the seats closer to the field on the Iowa sideline come in at just over $100 on Vivid Seats.
But the University of Iowa itself has a way for you to combine all that by offering a few different travel packages to fans.
The full package (called an Air Package) includes round-trip airfare out of Cedar Rapids, a hotel booking at the same hotel the Hawkeyes will be staying, a reserved-seat ticket to the game and a bunch of souvenirs and stuff on top of that. The per-person price of that one depends on the size of the group, but one person going by themselves would have to pay just under $2,600 for the whole enchilada.
There are two other package options from the school.
First, they have a package (Land-only Package) that includes everything in the full package except the airfare for at least $1,000 cheaper, which gets the door wide open for a road trip. If you drove from Local 5 studios nonstop to San Diego, it would take about 26 hours.
On the flip side of that, they’re offering a package that’s only airfare, and none of the rest of it, which comes out to about the same as the Land-only package.
Going to San Diego to watch the Hawkeyes play USC would be awesome, regardless of whether the Hawks win or lose. If you can’t make it out there to support them in person, though, you can always catch it from home on FS1. The game will start at 7 p.m. on the 28th.
