There is a certain amount of terror that goes with taking
200 kids out of town on an extended trip.
Part of it is logistics. For
example:
A.
When you get to the hotel, where do you park the
truck?
B.
When you get to the hotel, where do 200+ folks
gather to get keys? (make sure boys and girls don’t have adjoining rooms)
C.
When you get to the hotel, how do you get to
your room without causing other guests to have a seizure?
D.
When you get to the hotel, who does the room
check?
E.
When you get to the hotel, where is the best
place to watch rooms from so that kids don’t mate?
Every time you move them, feed
them, load or unload them, dress them or meet with them, there has to be a
plan. Every rumor has to be chased
down. Every over-zealous parent has to
be tranquilized. Every illness has to be
tended to. For many freshmen, their
first overnight trip with the band is their first one without mom and dad. Because of this, at the first truck stop
break we take in the middle of the night in South Alabama, they will inevitably
buy 2 bags of Twizzlers (because 1 won’t do), chips, chocolate, some
combination of soda and energy drinks, and a dozen day old donuts because “they
were on sale”. They will eat most of
this within 30 minutes of purchase and when we reach our destination, they will
let me know that they are near death from some sort of mysterious, sudden-onset
stomach flu. An hour later, having
thrown up the bulk of the previous night’s purchase, they will find me to tell
me they are feeling much better….., and to borrow money for lunch since they
spent all of theirs at the truck stop.
Sometimes
the problem to be solved was not of the kid’s doing. We pulled up into the parking lot of Sea
World in San Diego and unloaded before I realized that I had left the Sea World tickets back at the concert venue
an hour away. David Pickler handed the
Sea World folks his credit card as collateral and they let the kids enter while
a bus driver took me back to get the tickets.
Another time, we arrived at a Texas Rangers baseball game only to discover
that the tickets we had were for the night before. The large envelope they came in had the
correct date but the tickets inside were for seats that already had people in
them. Evidently, the night before, there
had been a large block of empty seats in the outfield bleachers and that had
seemed odd to the Rangers ticket people.
Proving that God takes care of Band Directors and idiots, the Rangers
gave us box seats on the first base side (all they had available) and did not
charge us an extra penny
Having said all of the above, I did
truly enjoy traveling with the band. Our
kids always seemed to be able to handle whatever happened with patience, grace,
and a sense of humor. I have played Red
Rover with band kids during a snowstorm in Union City the night before All West
Tryouts, in the parking lot of a truck stop in South Alabama at 2:00 a.m. on
the way to Disney World, and the infamous William Ingram Red Rover incident in Texas
many years later while returning from a Spring trip.
I have a lot of special memories
from those trips and not all of them involve someone doing something
stupid. At the moment, one trip sticks out in my mind as particularly memorable
for an unusual reason. When we took the
band to New York City in 2014, it fulfilled a bucket list item for me by
allowing me to conduct on the stage at Carnegie Hall. The kids did a wonderful job but the
performance is not my most memorable occurrence from that trip. It started to snow that night while we were
on top of the Empire State Building. In
actuality, it was snowing UP the side of the building. I thought that was one of the coolest things
I had ever seen. It had stopped snowing
by the time we came down and so it was off to the hotel with the kiddos to put
them in bed for the last night. After
getting all of the younger ones back to the hotel, we decided to let the
Seniors walk back down to Time Square for desserts (mainly cheesecake) at
Junior’s. It started to snow again and I
mean really, really snow. That 2 hours
with the seniors (of which Mary Ann was one) was as nice a 2 hours as I have
ever spent. “The road goes ever on and
on…”, or so said Mr. Tolkien. Thanks for
sharing it with me for just a little while.
