Band and Choir Head to Florida
June 22, 2008
Seventy-seven students, ten chaperones, and one photographer will be heading off to Florida on Sunday, June 15th at 7:30am. They will be traveling in two motorcoaches provided by Anderson Coach. Their destination.....Lake Buena Vista, Florida--Disney World!
Educational Tours, Inc. has put together a wonderful itinerary for the trip. On Tuesday, the students will attend workshops put on by Disney World: The choir's session will be at Disney's Saratoga Springs Resort, with the band heading to Epcot's Backstage Rehearsal Stage for their session. Wednesday, they will both perform at Galaxy Palace Theater in the Magic Kingdom. Thursday they will start off with a buffet breakfast at Planet Hollywood and then head to the Gulf of Mexico. They will end their day with a beach side BBQ dinner. Friday will be spent at Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios. Saturday.....they head for home.
Keep on eye on this web site.....Kiersten Jennings, our photographer, will be keeping you up to date with photos of the trip. Check back often to see any new pictures. Have fun trying to find your child in the group.
Monday, June 16th
We were off to a great start. We rolled out of Osakis around 8:00am; 25 minutes ahead of schedule. The following link shows the start of our trip: And We're Off
We made our first stop in Wisconsin, where we split into groups and hand some lunch. After an hour, we were on our way. Little did we know that we would be spending 12 hours in the beautiful state to our east. You will note there is only one photo of a state entrance sign...Wisconsin! That was the main part of our first day. By the time we made it to the other states, most of us were sleeping or it was too dark to get a good shot.
Shortly after leaving our food stop, bus number 2 had a maintenance problem. The hose for the cooling system broke. Thank goodness Rich Alverson was along as a chaperone. He managed to take one of the spare hoses the bus company keeps on hand, splice it, and attach it back together...he was our hero. We had to do a slight adjustment to the air bag on one side and an hour and a half later, we were ready to roll; with one slight detour to our route....due to the heavy rains, and the flooding, Interstate 94 was closed by Wisconsin Dells. The highway patrol told us to take a route further north, keeping us away from what could have been a 4-5 hour delay. That added some more time on to the truck through Wisconsin. We were overjoyed to see the Illinois border sign.
Even with all of our delays, we managed to pull in to Florida around 7:30pm with enough time to eat pizza and enjoy the pool. Here's a glimpse of the fun by the pool: We're Here!
Tomorrow we are off to Epcot and Saratoga Springs Resort for our workshops. Stay in touch, more exciting updates to follow.
Tuesday, June 17th
Epcot was amazing. From the sounds of it, the workshops were awesome (chaperones were not allowed in the workshops). All of the students felt they learned something and had fun too! The choir had a surprise visit from Mickey Mouse...which was a hit. Evidently they all stopped singing when he walked in...fun to know that he still has the same effect on high school students as he did when they were younger.
The following links, share our day.
Thursday, June 19th
I'm sure many of you came on the site today hoping to find some more pictures of our adventures yesterday. Sorry...we put in a long day and didn't get back to the hotel until 11:30 last night. After tucking all in bed, having our chaperone meeting, and cleaning up from the day...the pictures had to wait.
We had another great day at Magic Kingdom. The performances were awesome. You can be very proud of your children. We even had visitors from Osakis enjoy the band performance: Jeff and Mandy Lien and family were there for the day and decided to take in the show.
We had some rough weather for awhile which shut down some rides for a time, but most of us managed to see everything we wanted to. The parade and fireworks were a great ending to the day.
Today we headed to Planet Hollywood for breakfast; a little shopping; and then off to St. Petes' Beach Florida. Sirata resort is great. We are still there as I'm writing. It was such a beautiful day, that the students voted to stay and watch the sunset. Since there were no other plans for the night....here we are. We'll be heading back to the hotel about 9:00pm, after a quick dinner break.
I have managed to put up a few pictures for your enjoyment. Others will be up tomorrow (it takes about 40 minutes per slideshow to upload to the computer....I'll finish them off after we reach the hotel).
Hope you have been enjoying our trip as much as we have. Stay tune...more to come.
Friday, June 20th
Here are a few more links from yesterday:
We'll, we had an awesome trip. The students were wonderful. You can be very proud of all of them. The tour company commented on how terrific the week was and how they were impressed with our group.
We got home late again tonight. Check the site after our return to Osakis; pictures from today will be posted Sunday night. But, until then, we wanted to give you a glimpse of the terrific day we had at Wild Kingdom and Hollywood Studios--check out the pictures below...Brianna Kleve enjoyed her ride on the Tower of Terror.
Thanks for joining us on our trip. Hope you enjoyed the movies!
Sunday, June 22nd
The last of the pictures are linked below. I tried to get as many of the groups as I could however, it would depend on who we ran in to or which group was willing to take 1 of the 2 cameras we were working with. I apologize if some of the students don't have many photos on these slideshows....hopefully I was able to get the majority of our group. Again, thank you for joining us on our trip....we truly had a lot of fun. ~Kiersten Jennings
