Marching Band – Spokane Competition

Jaelee got to go on her first away trip with school for marching band. The marching band went up to Spokane (about 7 hours away) to the Pacific Northwest Marching Band Championships. Greg and I decided to go as well. Jayse had football practice so we stayed with a friend for the weekend.

I was so glad Greg’s cardiologist said he could still go. It’s our anniversary month and I knew we’d be doing nothing on our actual anniversary so we were treating this like a nice little weekend away for us.

Sadly, as life has been lately it was not that nice romantic weekend we hoped for. Literally 5 mins after leaving as I looked up the address to our hotel to get directions started google said it was permanently closed. I had booked this hotel a month before, I had gotten no information my reservation had been canceled, in fact I went to the app I have for this brand of hotels to get the address and it still looked a ok. I thought to keep it safe I’d call the hotel but every time I tried it went to a line that just said all circuits were busy. I was also trying to do all of this in rush hour traffic while driving. I didn’t get to leave work as early as I hoped and Greg wasn’t supposed to drive. He’s not much help looking up things on the phone so it was a challenge.

I finally found another number to call and got a hold of someone. After 40 mins on the phone with her she confirmed that the hotel did in fact close, 3 day prior! She found us another hotel and got us one booked. I had used points to book the original hotel and had to call another number to talk with someone to get my points back. It was crazy. Luckily eventually I did get those back.

We were a few hours outside of Boise when we were hungry. Greg can’t eat like he used to so we pulled into a gas station and looked for restaurants and at their menus to find one that had chicken or fish. We found a menu that looked like he could find something from so I drove there. It was a pretty fancy restaurant in an old hotel. Nobody was there so we thought it would be quick…cuz we still had over 4 hours of driving ahead of us and it was 7 already.

Turns out again we were wrong, they took forever! And when we did finally get our fish mine was not even cooked all the way, it was still raw. I couldn’t eat it, the texture was just a no. Greg ate it for me and I had my potato. After an hour and 40 mins we finally got out of there and back on the road.

By the time we got to Spokane and checked into our hotel we were so tired, it was almost 1 am our time. We went straight to bed and both fell asleep pretty quickly and woke up the next morning. I gotta say the hotel was pretty nice and the bed really comfortable.

We went downstairs and got some breakfast. Then we checked out of our hotel cuz we were staying somewhere else that night. We drove towards where the band competition was, checking out Spokane.

My BFF Amy lives only a couple of hours away so she met us there for lunch. We had a nice lunch and then all went to Jaelee’s competition. I had purchased tickets online with assigned seating so we walked in with VIP wrist bands right to our seats. It was pretty nice.

We got to watch a few of the bands before Jaelee’s and they were awesome! The bands up there are on a whole nother level. Just from the flags and props from one of the bands I knew it was going to blow us away. I decided to record it so Jaelee could see it later. Turns out I was right about that band cuz in the end they won the whole thing!

Jaelee’s band did awesome! They looked and sounded so good. They didn’t have their 3rd and last movement ready enough so they just did the first 2 but it was still great!

After we found out what position they’d be in for the 2nd round – they placed 9th out of 15 bands, not bad, we left to go see more of Spokane. Amy took her boys to a trampoline park and Greg and I went downtown to the River Walk. It was beautiful we really enjoyed our walk. It did poop Greg out and I ended up in a toilet with no TP and it was the kinda bathroom where I really needed TP. I ended up having to call Greg to bring me some napkins from the car! I was in a single stall by myself. Just another fun moment on our trip, LOL.

I have to say it would of been nice to still have a hotel room somewhere for us to go back to and relax for a bit but we made it work.

We went back for Jaelee’s second competition where they did really well again. We left after their performance and went back downtown to have dinner with Amy and her boys. Where we had a heck of a time finding somewhere to park. Greg ended up getting in the drivers seat and fitting my car in a tight spot where he couldn’t even get out of the car so he had to come out the back. On our walk to the restaurant I saw 2 mice scutter across the sidewalk and I AM TERRIFIED of mice. I couldn’t stop freaking out and had the heebie jeebies for a while.

Luckily the food and restaurant were nice. In fact one of the guys working there went to BSU and talked to us for a bit. Such a small world.

After dinner we headed out to our next hotel. It was a few hours away drive. We were doing what the band was doing and driving a few hours home after the competition to get a head start on the drive home the next day. We got to our hotel about 10:30 and were so tired we went right to bed again.

We love watching Jaelee in marching band and glad we went. She had a great time! She said her seat in the bus was kinda uncompfy but other than that it was all good things. Such a great experience for her.

Greg annoyed at our fancy dinner place the first night.