Band Geeks Gone Wild!

I promised to start writing stories this week, and I won’t disappoint. I’ll start off with the retelling of the most annoying part of our trip. It was our last morning in the hotel in downtown Gatlinburg before we went up to the cabin in the mountains. I’m just mildly hungover from the night before, so you can probably imagine the mood I was in. At approximately 8am, on a Saturday mind you, I hear the first trumpet from the parking lot outside.

The sound is unmistakeable. Whoever was tooting on the trumpet was warming up. My first thought is:

“Oh, is there going to be a band playing this morning by the pool? That’s interesting, I guess. Hopefully they won’t be warming up for long and I can get some more sleep.“

Then I hear a trombone start warming up. Then a tuba chimes in. Then I hear three more trumpets start up and a couple of bass drums join in. Keep in mind that all of these instruments are warming up separately. There is no rhyme or reason to what they sound like as a whole, and it has got to be one of the most irritating sounds on this earth at 8am on a Saturday morning when you’re slightly hungover and all you want to do is sleep for the next three hours. I wish I had a recording of what we could hear from inside our room, it would drive you insane just listening to it through some headphones.

I kept racking my brain to try and figure out why in the world all that racket could possibly be coming from right outside our door on a fucking Saturday morning. I also wondered why no one else in any other room hadn’t already stepped outside their door and started yelling, or at the very least threatened them with a 12-gauge shotgun. This was Tennessee wasn’t it?

After fifteen minutes, I had enough and I called the front desk. This is how the conversation went:

Clerk: “Hello, front desk.”

Me: “Yes, uh… well, heh-heh huh-huh (we were a little loopy by this point, so it was getting funny) Uh… is there any timeline on when the band is going to stop warming up this morning?”

Clerk: “No sir, I’m sorry. We dont’ really have a timeline on that. But I do know there is a band out in the parking lot doing that.”

Me (to myself): “Do you think genius? Did you have to get a memo to know that?”

Me: “Uh… Oooookaaaaaay.” {click}

What? You know there’s a bunch of instruments being played out in the parking lot with no melody or rhythm whatsoever? And you’re not stopping this shit?

Since I’m basically up for good at this point, I decide to take a look outside while I’m still just in my underwear, and this is the sight I was met by:

They were everywhere! Walking back and forth tooting their god damn horns. And then some older guy, who must have been the ringleader, started warming up on guitar. It was hell for about the next five minutes, because after that they started to disperse. Maybe the guy at the front desk actually caught on that I was none too happy to be woken up this early on my fucking vacation by a bunch of high school band geeks warming up on instruments that they won’t ouch again after the age of eighteen. Or maybe they just got done warming up, I don’t know.

I was loopy as hell and couldn’t fall back asleep, so I had a little fun cussing up a storm and imitating the sounds of the instruments to make my girlfriend laugh. It turns out there was some bullshit music festival in town, and band geeks were in from all over the area warming up and irritating other vacationing couples who were trying to get some beauty sleep too.