We were taking our band buses back to Florida from Washington D.C. so everyone was already exhausted and very ready to be home. The girls bus broke down in middle-of-nowhere North Carolina at 2 A.M. in front of a random church. The vibes in there felt like Lord of the Flies because our air conditioner had stopped working and half the girls just wanted to go back to sleep while the other half were freaking out. One girl kept trying to convince everyone that she could fix the bus herself. Had we been in there longer, we may have started eating each other. The boys bus dropped all their passengers at a nearby Denny's and came back to shuttle the rest of us over. This was the morning after the night of St. Patrick's Day, so half the Denny's was full of drunk adults and the other half was a bunch of dejected marching band kids. The waitresses were all wearing shamrock hats, and they danced to Celebration to try to cheer us up. We were sleeping across the booths and pushing chairs together to create makeshift beds, and it looked ridiculous. All of the Snapchat memories I have from this ordeal are absolutely delirious. Our band director could not get ahold of the bus company to send us another bus, and she started crying and had a breakdown. We all wrote her a nice thank-you note on a napkin and signed it for her. That morning/afternoon, we finally got another bus sent to us, which then took us to a Golden Corral buffet for lunch. I promptly got food poisoning from this Golden Corral and I was fighting for my life in that bathroom. Overall an insane experience. My friend had been trying to take polaroid pictures the entire D.C. trip and none of them turned out EXCEPT for the one she took of the Denny's sign. I later turned this whole situation into a comedic script for my playwriting class.
Also on this trip: some 13 year-old boys called us hoes at the Lincoln Memorial. :)