Aloha!
I’m writing to you from the road somewhere near Tonkawa,
Oklahoma. I want to get as much of the day done now because I know it’s going
to be a late night tonight when we go to the ballgame. We just did something
(for the first time in our history, to my knowledge) that I think is so cool,
but you have to read on to figure out what it is. The boys are resting right now while we make
the final leg of our journey into OK city.
The quiet time is much needed about now.
This morning we said “goodbye” to our friends with the
Kansas City Boys Choir. From all
accounts, it was a great night for our boys and I think we have made a friend
for a longtime. They provided bag
lunches for all of us and also sent us on the road with a box of doughnuts for
the boys. It was pretty awfully nice of
them. One of their dads is a transplant to the area from Minnesota. Big Vikings fan who enjoyed the fact that
Matt Blair was a donor of our program. We
reminisced about the 1998 team and both ended the conversation wishing we hadn’t
deliberately relived those memories.
We made it on the road in good time and started heading
south. I like to get as many miles as I
can done in the morning when it is much cooler.
This old bus is great – but it does like to hover around that 80 degree
mark when it’s loaded with boys, pretty much no matter what the temperature
outside is. When we were on the road, we
gave the reports for the day and handed-out last night’s mail. Through four days, mail has been light. (Rud Family – You are doing great. I can’t keep up with printing all your
emails. J) We also took the time to formally check all
the journals, which are looking really good through three full days. These boys should have nice stories to tell
you when they get home.
About a half-hour down the road, we threw in a video about
the “Texas Rangers”. This got us a ways
into Kansas. While we were driving, I
received a text message from the mechanic of our bus, JD Dickenson from C&J
Bus Company in Bloomington, MN. He was
headed north on I-35 and passed us. That
was pretty cool that he saw our bus on the road this far from home.
Friends from home was kind of the theme for the middle part
of the day. In addition to passing JD,
we saw a number of cars from Minnesota, including a pretty sweet Mustang with
the top down carrying an older couple.
They waved enthusiastically as they passed us. We probably get hat every couple days on the
road and it always helps a little to see Minnesota license plates. The boys don’t see many of those though,
mostly because they have their noses buried in iPads and Gameboy DSs every
possible second they are allowed to. For
some of them, I am pretty sure they are going to start shaking and going into
withdrawal if they don’t get them for hours each day. It’s fairly annoying.
Back to our theme of “friends from home”. The Minnesota Boychoir is finishing-up their
tour to Texas in the next couple of
days. They do things a little different
than us when it comes to touring.
Instead of meandering to our furthest point like we do, hitting places
along the way, they elect to travel to their destination in large chunks, spend
more time at that location, then make it home in large chunks quickly. Each way has its benefits. They are on their final leg of the tour,
traveling from Dallas/Ft. Worth to Des Moines today (picking-up fresh drivers
in KC). We knew they were in the area so
we started texting their director Mark Johnson back and forth to see we could
facilitate a meeting. Our best guess was
that we would be at the same place, on the same road somewhere near the
OK/Kansas border, so we both did our best to time-up our lunches for the same
neighborhood.
We were having bag lunches today while their plans called
for a stop at a group of fast food establishments. We swung into the rest area to eat our
lunches and the boys ate much quicker than usual in the hopes of getting to
meet the other choir for a brief photo opportunity. Once lunch was finished, we hopped on the bus
and headed to the next exit where we saw the pair of Northland Coaches that the
Minnesota Boychoir was using parked at the McDonald’s. We pulled into the parking lot around the
corner came a little slice of home – about 40 of their boys and their director,
Mr. Johnson. We knew we only had a few
minutes, but we gathered all the boys together so they could say “hi” to the
friends they have made over the course of our two previous meetings with them
this season. It was great. We put them all in a group photo and said our
goodbyes. The entire exchange took 8-10
minutes, but that is all it took for this very cool, very rare,
opportunity. You can read about the fun
they have had here on their blog: http://www.boychoir.blogspot.com/
Back on the bus, we crossed the street and decided to use
this chance to fuel-up before hitting the road (and it was cheaper than most
places we’ve seen along the way). Since
we were just under half a tank, it shouldn’t be much, right? haha.
$400.00 later we were just about full.
This is the most painful part of tour, especially when you are in a bus
that gets a whopping 6 MPG when it is fully loaded.
And that pretty much brings us up to the present. We will probably let the boys sleep for
another 25 minutes or so as they will be up pretty late tonight. The plan is to check into the hotel around
3:30, relax for a bit in the pool if the timing works out, then eat at Sonic
nearby before heading to the baseball game.
These tend to be a lot of fun for the boys, but I can almost guarantee
they will be exhausted when it is over. As an incentive to try and get more Twitter
followers, I will post special content on our twitter feed that you can only
get if you follow us at @thechoirboys. Check it out! We have a chance to sleep
in a bit tomorrow so I hope we can take advantage of that.
Don’t expect another post tonight, but I try to give a quick
update with some pictures if I can.
-P.J.
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