While I intended to post a lot more content, life happens. I have awful seasonal depression and that mixed with dealing with a broken heart has smushed my creativity. Writer’s block has been bad for the past few weeks. Today I thought I’d at least post something.
In 4 weeks, I leave for New York on an orchestra tour. Every other year at my school the orchestra or the band will get to go on a “tour” which is not a trip where they play music at a bunch of places, but instead is a trip where they tour the city. I believe the name is misleading slightly. Anyways, I’m a senior so this will be my last trip with the orchestra. I was lucky enough to be at the school on an odd year, so I got to go on 2 trips instead of only one. The last trip was 2 years ago, and we went to LA.
The journey to me being allowed to go on the trip is long and rough and not something I want to get into now. Essentially, I did bad things and was “untrustworthy”, so my parents didn’t want me to go. This was decided months before the tour happened, but I didn’t tell my orchestra director. By the time I told him I wasn’t going, there were 2 weeks until we left, and all my stuff had been paid for. It was non-refundable and I was allowed to go because we couldn’t get our money back. My mom came along as a chaperone, and everything was set.
My family doesn’t travel a lot. My brother has grown up with a ridiculous amount of food allergies and between that and his mental health issues, we never traveled. I had been on a plane twice before. Once when I went to Colorado when I was 9, and again when I went to Chicago with my mom when I was 13. Going as far as California was exciting for me. Both my parents traveled there a lot and at one point I was convinced my dad was CIA after he returned from one of his trips there. It meant a lot for me to be able to go and I think I’ll share a bit about that trip.
When our plane landed in LA, us Minnesotans shed the extra pair of sweatpants we had worn over our shirts and ran out to enjoy the warm 65-degree weather which was a welcome break from the 9 degrees we had back home. We piled onto buses and instead of going to the hotel, we were dragged to a farmer’s market. The traffic in California was horrid and their “do not enter” signs were aggressively large. None of us cared about the long drive, though by the end of the five-day trip the traffic would annoy us all. The first embarrassing moment of the trip happened when I bought a milkshake at the market. The man who made it filled it annoyingly full and we wouldn’t be back to the hotel for another few hours. The only other interesting thing happened when we lost my friend at the market. She came back to the bus 20 minutes late with the explanation that she got lost and bought a cactus. We then had to google the flight rules for spikey plants. It was quite the adventure.
The hotel we stayed in was right next to Disney land and we never went to Disney land. Instead, we went to universal studios, toured Sony pictures (I saw the ghost buster cars!) and went to the San Diego Zoo. I also discovered the best grilled cheese sandwich at a packing house as well as a confusing drink called “frozen hot chocolate”. There were many things on that trip that were shocking and life changing for me. The most shocking thing was the amount of clothing that people wore when it was 68 degrees. I saw a woman wearing a down coat and long pants in that weather while I was dressed only in shorts and a tank top. I’m pretty sure half of the Californians would die if they were forced to spend a winter in Minnesota. My orchestra director told the same story to every school we visited about ice fishing. With no context he would say, “In the winter we drive out onto the lake, drill a hole and fish.” Despite the normality of it, the look on the kid’s faces was hilarious.
Until I leave for New York, I want to spend some time sharing stories from California. Hopefully this won’t be my last, but I just got over the flu and have a shit ton of homework to catch up on.
Love Peppermint