My Florida Trip Day 1

shavingcream66

United States1219 Posts

January 10 2009 07:47 GMT

Hey guys, sorry it's taken so long to get to this, but my high school took a trip to Florida over winter break to perform in the Gator Bowl as well as at Disney World. For those of you who don't know, I'm part of the Arcadia High Marching Band from Arcadia, CA. We're a pretty huge band (around 350+ i believe) and we've marched in the Rose Parade 14(?) times and in 2 presidential inaugurations. Anyways...here we gooooo (i'll try to make it short)!

Day 1- Departure
At 2:00 am on a cold cold day, I joined with up with my fellow band mates at the band room as we waited to check in with our chaperones. All of us received hideous orange shirts (intended to make us stick out more so we don't get lost -_-) and name tags. After all that was done, we boarded our buses at around 3:00am and arrived at LAX airport at around 4 am. We sat around until 5am because there weren't actually any workers at the gate at 3am. Anyways, there we were, with our ridiculous orange outfits clogging up a huge stretch of the SouthWest gate at LAX.

At around 6:30am, we finally took off from LAX heading towards Phoenix, Arizona where we would then transfer to another flight. The airplane was pretty small overall and with my band being mostly asian, we looked like a bunch of tourists from China D:

and everyone was freaking tired since I don't think anyone of us slept the night before

After waiting at the Arizona airport for a good hour or so, we boarded our connecting flight to Jacksonville via some ghetto city in Missouri.

yep..nothing in the deep south

Two hours later, we touchdown'd at Jacksonville Airport in Florida. The airport was pretty nice if you ask me

although they had these ugly dragon wall decoration thingies at the luggage claim area -_-x

Once all the luggage claiming was taken care, we boarded airport shuttles to be taken to our hotel where we would be staying for a couple of days rehearsing for our performance at the Gator bowl. My bunk buddies brought a Wii along for the trip but we soon realized that the hotel TV didn't have those red/white/yellow plugs (I HATE IT WHEN THEY DO THAT). So, being desperate gamers, we spent a good 20 minutes clawing at the back of the TV.

Tired and dejected, we decided to take a trip and explore around the city of Jacksonville. One thing to note, there are like NO crosswalks in Jacksonville where you can actually cross the street. Everyone there, including the locals, jay walks. -_-x Anyways, we located a Denny's near our hotel and decided to settle in for some hot chow.

Nachos D:

Returning back to the hotel room, we were all quite despondent realizing that today would be a night with no Super Smash Bros Brawl. In any case, we booted up the laptop and played some Starcraft

With a wakeup call at 5:30am, we decided it was best we sleep early. So we did. :|

That's it, day ONE of 7 days. Yeah, day 1 was just a traveling day. Stay tuned for more updates!