Posted October 5
One Time at Band Camp Well, this story isn't like that. But many things have happened on our road trips. The second weekend in October has provided the Roadies and the band with some of their greatest adventures, outstanding performances, and agonizing results. Here's some of the more memorable events that happened this week in Roadie History:
One Time at Band Camp Well, this story isn't like that. But many things have happened on our road trips. The second weekend in October has provided the Roadies and the band with some of their greatest adventures, outstanding performances, and agonizing results. Here's some of the more memorable events that happened this week in Roadie History:
2000 Brookings & Madison doubleheader. After arriving in Brookings, several Roadies had to fan out in town to find cord that could be used to re-string a marimba. That evening in Madison, we got a flatbed trailer filled with pit equipment wedged in the entry gate to the DSU field. Once we freed it, we had to make a ¾ mile detour to the back entrance.
2001 Eden Prairie, MN It was COLD the coldest night ever for a band competition. Cold when we got there cold for the show. The band stayed outside for over 2 hours prior to the show and the kids were frozen. And so were the Roadies.
2002 Eden Prairie, MN A borrowed flatbed trailer was a little larger that we figured, and we only made it through the exit gate with 1" to spare! And the band had 4 "scrims" as part of the show, and the fabric on one had to be hand stitched in the parking lot until show-time.
2003 Des Moines, IA. Our initial trip to Valley Fest. After touring the site, Head Roadie Neil still got the pit lost by leading them into a dead end on the way to warm up. And we got the shark cage stuck in tree branches on the way to the stadium. But the performance was one of the BEST EVER, falling short to Irondale who performed almost 4 hours after Lincoln. On the trip home Roadie Dean Versteeg was pulling a flatbed trailer when one of our drum major platforms opened up and jumped off the trailer on I-80 west of Des Moines!
2004 "Super Saturday". The band traveled to Vermillion for Quad State and then to Des Moines for Valley Fest. It was a nice morning for loading, and when we were all set to roll we got nowhere. Bus 2 fried a light relay on our pit trailer, and we had to unplug the trailer lights for the bus to move. Thankfully we had Jay Hardy to re-wire the relay box in the parking lot at USD in order for the band to head to Des Moines (with lights, anyway). At USD the discovery that the color guard had missed loading their prop scrolls on our flatbed led to the mad dash for 2 Roadies on an ATV back across the USD campus to the pit trailer, and equally mad return trip. The exhilaration of success was short-lived as they then raced back to the trailer for the yard markers because USD failed to provide on the back field. And LHS scored lower than Roosevelt for the first time ever. The final excitement came when an atv-towed flatbed of ours got caught between the concrete bases of the flag poles out front of the Dome (history repeating itself?). Finally at Des Moines, there was the special bounce in the drum majors during the show because Neil failed to properly lock down the right side of the 50-yard line ladder platform. We knew it was not going fall apart, but the drum majors did not. But LHS took Sweepstakes in Des Moines!
2005 - Des Moines, IA Saturday morning we loaded up after the rehearsal and made it no further than the construction in front of LHS where bus 1 and the pit trailer made a wrong turn in the parking lot and nearly jackknifed the trailer trying to get out. Not an inauspicious start. Once underway, the buses spread out on I-29 as 5 & 6 could barely muster 65 mph. They didn't end up back together until they pulled into the Sheraton parking lot in Des Moines.
Roadies learned not to get between the band and the Papa John's car when someone yells "PIZZA IS HERE!" Valleyfest is a timed event and the drum line lost to us, a bunch of mostly 40+ Roadies by a wide margin getting off the field. Roadie Judy Olson, who was doing color guard duty Saturday, ran 80 yards (definitely not in running shoes) after retrieving a forgotten flag, and still beat the drum line by nearly 8 seconds, and they had less than half the distance to go
2006 Vermillion A fairly uneventful unload and leisurely trip to the field resulted in us following Roosevelt in line outside, where we had to wait at the west end of the east-bound dragons RHS had for props. We've had bad views before, but the tail end of the dragons set a new low.
2007 Orange City, IA Just when the fireworks started (which coincided nicely with the heeaviest rain), Head Roadie Jeff was lying on the roof of the pit trailer trying to fix the roof vent as the wind had torn it away from the latching mechanism, a task performed half standing on the drum majors ladder, which was in turn standing on a wet slippery picnic table. Back at LHS, we unloaded the horns during a 'dry' spell, thinking the buses weren't too far behind. The buses ended up being farther behind than we thought and the dry spell didn't last quite long enough. So we rolled out a 30x50' tarp and 6 of us Roadies stood in the wind and drizzle holding it over the horns and drums. Did I mention wind? It was at this time that the wind decided to add to the enjoyment; a gust would arrive and announce itself by sending a wave from one end of the tarp to the other. Did I mention rain? When the 'wave' got to the end of the tarp and 'snapped,' it would send a fairly sizable spray of water into the face of whichever Roadie happened to be at that end of the tarp. and the swirling wind made sure we all got our turns. But even so, the spirits of these Roadies weren't dampened as we kept ourselves occupied by laughing and joking at our predicament.
