Day 86

Date: August 9, 2011
Time: 12:54am (EST)
Playing on iTunes: "On A Hymn Song of Philip Bliss" by David Holsinger


Location: Indiana, PA
Recent Trip: 330 miles

So welcome to Indiana, PA. It was not the most desirable trip here. We pulled into the rest stop and Hop woke us up by whistling and saying, "WAKE UP GUYS! We have a problem!" The guard bus broke down on the side of the highway about 20 miles before our last rest stop, which was about 2 hours away from the housing site. So we needed to get all of our luggage off the bus and onto the food truck so that our bus could go and pick up everyone and everything off of the guard bus. In the meantime, the battery and pit split up between different buses, trucks, and RVs. I got to ride one of the RVs and sat in the front. That was a great time because I had so much leg room compared to the bus and the seat was much more comfortable than my actual bus seat. Go figure. Well, aside from having to move our stuff to the food truck, the ride wasn't too bad. I got enough sleep before we got to the school and I was ready for the rehearsal day.

                

For the morning block, the pit rehearsed outside and worked on some different minor changes that needed to be made to make sure everything was perfect for this upcoming finals week. As soon as we finished with those changes and got back from lunch, we felt a little bit of rain. Vanessa made the call to tarp all the instruments. Good call, because in no time it started to rain, then pour, then eventually monsoon. Luckily everything was covered. Except for my mallets. Come to find out the rain was so intense that it blew my tarp in the exact opposite direction that I intended it to which led to my mallets getting soaked. This wasn't good because I need the mallets the play and you cannot play with waterlogged mallets. They leave water marks all over the keyboard and they just sound squishy and dead. So one thing that we do to fix that problem is break out our absorber and place it on the keyboard, then continuously strike it with our wet mallets so that every hit squeezes out more and more water onto the absorber. It doesn't fully fix the problem, but it cleans up extremely soaked mallets. Luckily we have lots and lots of mallets so I was able to use a completely new set. Hopefully tomorrow there is some sun that I'm able to put these out in so they dry and become useable for this last week of tour.

HERE'S THE NEW GUARD BUS!! It's a rental bus for tonight while the old guard bus gets repaired. We only have this drive tonight to Ohio and then one more long drive to Indianapolis and we are done for the season (aside from the small drives to the stadium for shows).


After our ensemble rehearsal, we did a community performance for the town on Indiana, PA. Half of the people in the audience had seen us last year when the Cadets were here and half had never seen us before so it was great seeing the different variety of people in the audience. I can assure you that by the end, they all were saying, "I want to come back next year." With a standing ovation from the crowd, we played some encore tunes including our all-time favorite "Don't Stop Believing". They all seemed to love that.

Now off to Massilon, OH! Shouldn't be too long of a drive. I hope not because I'm all congested and not feeling to great with this extreme head cold. 

Thought of the Day: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."