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 fourth journal entry, as told this morning to editors at The Star. She filed her journal after the Oxford buses rolled into Manhattan.
NEW YORK – It is unbelievable to be actually sitting here! I think everyone is finally realizing we are doing this.
Right now we’re unloading our buses on the side of some road in Manhattan, right outside the Lincoln Tunnel. Some of the people are saying they think we might get a ticket because of how we’re parked. Oh, well. We’re waiting to unload our stuff because they’re unloading all of the parents first.
The weather is cold, but it’s clear. It’s not too bad. We are way behind schedule, so we don’t know what our schedule today is going to be. We were supposed to go to the Today show and visit the Empire State Building. So I’m not sure how we’re going to spend our time today. But I’m sure it’ll be fun.
After eating in Knoxville last night, we watched movies for a while longer until we got to Virginia. That’s where we stopped again to switch drivers. After we did that, everybody tried to get as comfortable as they could and tried to go to sleep. But it wasn’t that easy.
On my bus, the door kept breaking. It would actually come open as we were driving down the interstate! No one fell out, thankfully. But we had to stop once to fix our door. Really, we did.
Oh, it gets better. The headlights on our lead bus kept flickering from high (beam) to low, and then they just went out. So right when we hit the Pennsylvania line at 3 in the morning we had to stop and fix that bus’ lights.
We had to stop in New Jersey once, too, and that’s when there were rumors that we weren’t going to have time to change before we started doing stuff in New York because we were running so behind schedule. Everybody was trying to change clothes under their blankets and in the bus’ bathroom because everybody was in their pajamas and didn’t want to get caught on the street in New York in their pajamas. People were out with their bottled water and their toothbrushes trying to brush their teeth on the side of the road. It was very uncomfortable and awkward to do so, but we got changed.
The night was crazy. We were all tired, and we didn’t get that much sleep like we thought we would. We had to keep stopping several times to switch drivers and because of the problems with the buses, and every time they did they kept turning the darned lights on.
We got to New Jersey around 6 in the morning, and all we saw was a bunch of country. Then, all of a sudden, there was the skyline of New York! The bus just erupted and the cameras started going off. Ever since then it’s been just crazy! We were just so ready to be here. Everybody is up and moving around and jumping around and in a frenzy!
