News and Notes about the Dunn Family
Results from the State Marching Competition in San Antonio. The following advance to finals. Listed in performance order….
L.D. Bell - 7:30 pm
Haltom - 7:45 pm
Duncanville - 8:00 pm
Coppell - 8:15 pm
Churchill - 8:30 pm
break
Bowie - 9:00 pm
Marcus - 9:15 pm
Cedar Park - 9:30 pm
Richland - 9:45 pm
Westlake - 10:00 pm
Nov 4th, 2008 by Kevin
Waiting for the results is the hard part. The kids want to know, the adults want to know… and annoyingly the directors do know but they will not tell us. Or at least they say that they know!
It’s a long fifteen or twenty minutes. The kids are doing the wave, singing short parts of songs.
Results from the AlamoDome in San Antonio….soon!
Excellent prelim performance from DHS. Kathryn did excellent on her solo and the band was awesome. On the bus now going to a local high school to rest and do a short practice. Writing from phone so more later.
Nov 4th, 2008 by Kevin
Well - it does not matter when you hit Austin, Austin hits back.
Nine in the morning and we have made the 183 loop. Traffic slowed to a crawl about thirty minutes back in Round Rock. It’s not a complete stop yet, but it’s close.
The first hour and a half were quiet, as the sun rose and the bus dozed. Now everyone is awake and watching the world go by - very slowly.
We pulled drinks from under the buses in Waco when the drivers took their rest stop. There was concern that this would slow us down, but all the buses were very efficient and the coolers were pulled, emptied, and reloaded before the drivers returned. Score one for the chaperones.
MP3 players are the key technology at this point, that and wireless net access. Pushing on…
Nov 4th, 2008 by Kevin
Four in the morning when people are starting to arrive, coffee in hand, to begin the process of getting the Duncanville Band into travel mode. Looking at the things coming out of cars, you would think that we are mounting an expedition to the other side of the world. However, it’s just a “day trip” to San Antonio – if you consider 25 hours a day.
Last night about a dozen of the chaperones got together to pack the breakfast for over 410 people. Bag breakfast – each consisting of a muffin, a package of pop-tarts, and a banana – and the parts of a sack lunch delivered by a catering company will be the food that will keep the kids ready
to go when we arrive.
The lunch represents the first challenge. While it was described as a box lunch, it arrived as individual parts and needed to be assembled into individual portions. Of course, we have not allowed time for this process. Snap decision – we will hand out the lunch in individual parts along with the bag breakfast.
The band is on the field rehearsing as we are having our chaperone meeting and the buses arrive. The most critical thing at this point is to make sure the each person has their uniform and instrument – everything else is secondary. Chaperones check the students onto the buses, asking each a
checklist of “Do you have…” I hope the kids are listening, as we have no spares on-board.
Second challenge – two of the buses that have arrived are 50 passengers rather than 54 passengers. Since we are almost completely full there are very few extra seats on any of the buses, there are now five people in need of a place to sit. Fortunately, the High Hat (color guard) buses have some open
seats, so we are able to shift people to those buses.
Load-in took longer that I wanted – we did not depart till shortly before 6:00. That is time that will have to be made up on the trip, and between us and San Antonio is the traffic nightmare that is Austin. It’s going to be a long day – but a day that we have prepared for and looked forward to
all year.
Now it is time to get the kids settled on the dark bus and dash south, the sun still below the horizon out the left-hand window. Our eight bus caravan streams into the darkness toward the goal – State!
 | ||
