Making the trip to Colorado Springs this weekend with Katie, who will be investing her summer as part of Eagle Lake Camps of The Navigators' on-location day camps. Katie will be traveling through Colorado, Missouri, and Wyoming serving as a day-camp counselor working with kids.
To keep it fresh, rather than drive down by ourselves, we decided to go Greyhound (the cost is roughly the same). We left Bozeman this morning at 3 a.m. and are due in the Springs at 9 p.m. We'll get Sunday in the Springs, and then I'll ride back on Monday, working as I go by way of the free wifi while someone else does the driving.
It's been almost thirty years since I've been on a bus like this one. Back during my Mizzou days, I was one of 250 members of Marching Mizzou and, somewhat more gloriously, Mini Mizzou, the 40-member pep band for the university. We took several long bus trips back in the day, and they were usually pretty fun for all involved.
If I remember correctly, during the two years I was in the band, I made trips to perform at then-Big 8 football games in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, as well as Big 10 school Indiana. We also performed at a Broncos game in Denver and a Chiefs game in Kansas City, the latter of which was the coldest I've ever been in my life.
Mizzou wasn't very good in football back then, so playing the basketball games was a lot more fun. In addition to courtside seats at all the home games, we played the Big 8 conference tournaments, the Bragging Rights games between Mizzou and Illinois, and even played in the NCAA tournament when Mizzou was ranked #1 in the country. It was then, of course, a huge letdown when we traveled to Richmond, VA, got upset by #16 Austin Peay in the first round, and had to immediately get back on the bus to drive back to Columbia (40 hours round trip).
Other bus memories:
Dancing in the aisles to Milli Vanilli after a big win
Hanging with the cheerleaders and Golden Girls (who always traveled with us) and trying to convince them that band geeks were cool (exercise in futility)
Traveling across Kansas and, upon someone asking and receiving an answer to "What time is it?", following up in unison with "...and Kansas still sucks!" in reference to both the long state across which we were traveling as well as the Chickenhawks themselves
Feeling sorry for one of the senior saxophone players who, after the Austin Peay loss, got drunk before getting back on the bus and physically hijacked the boom box and played nothing but sad Billy Joel songs to cry to all the way back to Missouri
Good times, good times.