Tour Horror Stories

[Sideways]

It does not matter what corps you march and how new the buses are, something will break down at some point. Food will be less than adequate for a day or so at some point. A housing site in the hood or infested with prehistoric insects?

Sometimes these things become a truly defining moment for the personality of the corps.

Here is a link to a post about a fateful week early in July in 1999 for the Magic of Orlando.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/note.ph...1487&ref=mf

I can personally confirm these details.

Let's see what everyone else has experienced.

[soccerguy315]

I can't read the note.

But, the Spirit/Crossmen situation is the first story that jumps to my mind.

[va9590jm]

But, the Spirit/Crossmen situation is the first story that jumps to my mind.

The whole tour out west thing back in '79?

http://drumcorpswiki.com/Crossmen

[jakef]

This one time, we went to Louisiana.

True story.

[MetalTones2012]

A housing site in the hood or infested with prehistoric insects?

How about both on finals week?

[Tom Brace]

The whole corps getting stranded in DC after finals when the director left with all the cash and credit cards.

Then he went to jail.

[K-Swiss]

that note was epic

[BlooContraGuy]

Holy crap that note... ridiculous.

[Dir_en_X]

Here is what I remember from the 1999 debacle at Magic. If you were on that tour, please post what you remember (good and bad)

We left Pittsfield after some 4th of July parades, and per the norm with most corps, our bus breaks down. Our quite knowledgeable tour manager (who had never been on tour herself) told us to get off the busses with just our backpacks. We were told to leave our sleeping gear on the bus, and frankly, she was a ##### about it. So we all pile on to the other two busses. It was around midnight I think.

My next memory is Terry coming on the bus and telling us we are going to "camp out" in the parking lot of the Basketball hall of fame sometime in the wee hours. We all slept on the conrete...with no sleeping gear, we had to share with the other members.

We get back on the two busses and head south down '95 I presume. Here's a breakdown of the current cravan:

Two Charter Buses

one Semi Trailer

One Staff Van (literally a conversion van)

One Food Wagon

One Van pulling the souvie truck

We get a little further down the road and the staff van breaks down...so they shack up in New York City. That included all but one of the drum staff (the pit guy), Trey Harris, Mark Hoskins, and David Duffy. We get stuck in traffic because some guy decided to leap off the GW. Now it gets interesting...Terry learned that the guy driving the food wagon had kept pulling apart from the caravan to refuel...buying booze for the road. So, when confronted, he hauled ### with our food truck. Terry is on the phone with both the New York and New Jersey police putting out an APB on the truck. She gets a frantic call from John, one of our other drivers who kept telling us "You gotta play Enchano like this...Boo deep bah boo deep bah doo bee doo....like we did it back in Hawthorne"...anyway, John is frantic and keeps yelling at Terry that we had to find the truck, after Terry tried several times to calm him down, John responds "######, my teeth are on that truck!!!!"....wow.

So, we pull over at a rest stop in Jersey where none of us had money (we were rushed off the busses, so only a few were able to grab packpacks). Trey, Duffy, and Baby Jenn were awesome and gave everyone a buck or something to make sure everyone had something to eat.

Here's the current breakdown after Jersey:

2 tour busses

1 semi trailer

1 souvie truck

All I can remember happening next is:

- Being stuck at a random truck stop while we all slept on blankets on the little berm that was where the trucks stopped to wait for service. Still unshowered, still no money...we had nothing.

- We weren't allowed to smoke ciggaretes, but after yet another bus breakdown, I lit one up, and Mark Hoskins started to say something, but he knew what we had been going through, so he just told me to walk behind the building.

- This went on for what seemed like a week (though it was probably 3 days). Something broke down every day. We had no food, we had nothing. The girls didn't have hygeine products.

- We finally get to JEB Stuart high school (I think), with dirty bodies, hungry bellies, and empty pockets. We were given white t-shirts and shorts by some very generous parents, an awesome BBQ, and toiletries. We had a show that week in Virginia...which we did in white t-shirts and shorts, if I recall, it was a standstill. With Crown's percussion, because ours was stuck in some random locale on the east coast. How did the pit members fare???? Well...hahaha...here we go

-So the pit is nowhere to be found. This is the story I was told. The pit decided to make the last leg of the run IN the souvie wagon...it got over 100 degrees fast with one or two air pockets. The suburban that was pulling it broke down. They looked at the engine and saw a hose had broken. The pit looked at thier shoes, and what did everyone use to fix thier sandals with in those days???? DUCT TAPE!!! So, they rounded up all they could, taped the hose, and it broke down pulling into the service station. The souvie trailer was left on the highway for almost a year. They pulled up in a rented station wagon as we were marching out for our t-shirt stanstill. Oh, did I mention we had to ride in some folks cars as a drum corps to get to the show site?? Good stuff. At that point, all our vehicles were ####ed.

-What happened next was a miracle. Terry threw down her own money and got us busses that were so nice, the lead bus was dubbed "The death star" because it was so pimped out.

For everyone not on Facebook.

[Robot Rock]

Nothing that serious, but one year our finals housing site had two sets of showers: one was scalding hot, the other ice cold. Both were completely beyond what any normal human could be expected to take for more than a second or two. And being the final housing site of tour, we were there for around 6 days or so.

If you were lucky, you were able to acquire a large container of some kind, which you would use to gather water from one set of showers before heading to the other set—the shower you would actually "use".

It was funny at first, hearing screams and seeing guys jump in and out real quick, but the humor wore quickly.