Christi Chesnut, 17, a senior member of the Oxford High School marching band, is writing a daily journal for The Star’s Web site about the band’s trip to New York for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Christi, who plays the saxophone, will enroll in Auburn in the fall, where she will study veterinary medicine.This is her third journal entry, as told tonight to editors at The Star. She filed her journal from one of the Oxford buses as it made its way through eastern Tennessee. Her group is expected to arrive in New York Thursday morning.
KINGSPORT, Tenn. – After driving through Chattanooga, everybody on my bus was still up and awake and happy and talking. We put in the movie ‘Walk the Line’ and started watching it, even though our TV was still going off and on.
Finally, they told us that we were going to have a change in plans and were going to stop and eat. I don’t know what the change of plans was; I just know they told us we were going to go ahead and get something to eat.
We stopped and ate in Knoxville. It was just like we thought; there was a Shoney’s, a Cracker Barrel and a McDonald’s. The poor people who worked in the McDonald’s didn’t know that we were coming, but they did a pretty good job. They fed about 100 people (from Oxford) in an hour, plus it was 6:30 in Knoxville and there were people who lived there eating, too.
The people working at McDonald’s looked extremely depressed when we walked in. They were not very happy when two buses pulled up and 100 people walked in. So we ate and loaded up the buses again.
Now a lot of the people on my bus are sleeping already. We just climbed back on the buses after eating in Knoxville and tried to start bedding down for the night. We just settled in and got all snuggly.
Actually, these buses aren’t that bad to try to sleep in. I’m in a unique situation; my friends and I have seats that are facing each other instead of having some of the normal seats, so we can spread out and have more room. Some of the other people are shaking their heads at me, so I’m not so sure everyone agrees that the buses are that comfortable.
Right now, I think most of us are just dealing with this crazy, long bus ride. Most of the excitement about leaving for New York from this morning (when we loaded up at the football stadium) is gone. There’s not much chatter or anything like that. Everybody’s pretty subdued.
