I was appointed Director of Bands at UNK in the fall of 2010. One of the first things I was made aware of upon arriving on campus was that my predecessors, Dr. Gary Davis and Dr. Neal Schnoor, had an international trip in the works for our marching band. I was given the option to go forward with the planned trip or scrap it—I immediately decided to go forward with the trip since I had a background of international travel with music; these experiences changed my life in innumerable positive ways. Drs. Davis and Schnoor had taken the band to Italy twice previously in 2006 and 2009, and I was happy to continue this recent tradition by resolving to take the band overseas every four years.
The New Year in Rome, 2012
My first trip with the band started in late December of 2011. I was still quite new to the position and although I was nervous, I was excited to expose my new-to-me students to the wonders of international travel. Our itinerary was somewhat adventurous: three separate flight groups landing in Nice, France, a stop in Monaco on the way to Milan, Italy, followed by a trip on a fast train all the way down to Rome for the new year, finishing with flights home from Rome.
We performed once each in Nice, Milan, and Rome; each was a parade format, although in the first two cities we were the only people doing the parading. The reactions we had from the people of Nice and Milan were mixed to say the least, but luckily most folks seemed to enjoy our spectacle. I do remember being vigorously questioned by a Milan city official before our parade. Luckily our tour guide had taught me the one phrase in Italian that I needed to know-Io non parlo Italiano, which is I don’t speak Italian. That’s all it took to get this agitated person to leave me be but it helped that our tour guide stepped in to explain that we indeed had the necessary permit to parade through the streets. Crowds gathered to watch us play at the end of our routes in Nice and Milan and were highly entertained by the American music from the 70s and 80s they heard. The flag work by our color guard members was particularly popular in these performances as well.
The highlight performance was in Rome on New Year’s Day, as it was more like an actual parade, although at just around four blocks, a very short one that traveled from the Castel Sant’Angelo to St. Peter’s Square. The crowd in St. Peter’s Square was gigantic because people were gathering to witness the Pope’s New Year’s Blessing, and we were able to be there to hear it after the parade. After the little while it took for the Pope to finish the blessing in four languages, we circled up and started playing through our pep band playlist. Many stayed to watch and hear us, making it a pinch me to see if it is real moment.
This trip was full of amazing non-musical sights and experiences as well. The more adventurous people in the group sought out local food and drink options in each location. Many found fancy chocolates, pastries, and other desserts in Nice, and pasta dishes in multi-course Italian meals, not to mention fine cheeses and wines in both countries. Nice still has an intact medieval old town which we toured, and for many in the group it was the first time seeing and touching the Mediterranean Sea.
We spent a few hours in Monaco, home to both the famous Gran Prix and the casino featured in several James Bond films. Some in the group walked up to the Prince’s Palace and others stayed down by the seaside to see all the huge superyachts in the harbor. In Milan we toured the Duomo, the famous opera house La Scala, as well as spending time in its Victorian-era shopping promenade. Each of these cities had their traditional Christmas markets open as well.
Our time in Rome was spent seeing the Coliseum, several ancient Roman ruins, and fountains. Several students took the coach bus to the Coliseum to see a fireworks show on New Year’s Eve while others opted to stay in the hotel and watch all the different European TV coverage from around the continent.
Most memorable were our visits to the Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s Basilica. Although the Vatican Museum had a mind-boggling collection of art and artifacts, the experience was difficult due to the overwhelming crowds. Our tour guide pulled us through the museum at such a fast pace that all our time was spent pushing through people rather than actually taking in what the museum had to offer. The silver lining, though, was being able to see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It is difficult to describe the immense size of St. Peter’s Basilica once you have been inside. The best story involves one of our band members and her experience at St. Peter’s. Heather Walker, one of our trumpet players, has spina bifida and moves around on a motorized cart most of the time. She was of course apprehensive about getting around Europe, and we needed to help her navigate all the stairs and cobblestones and other uneven surfaces through the whole trip. The stairs going up to St. Peter’s were going to be too much for us to deal with, but one of the staff members saw us struggling and offered to help. In the end, Heather was taken up to the Basilica in none other than the Pope’s private golden elevator!
Norway’s National Day, 2015
Before coming to UNK, I had made a good friend with one of my fellow graduate students, who happens to be from Norway. We both graduated the same year, and he went back to Norway to teach band while I headed to Nebraska. We kept in touch, and eventually he invited me to come to Norway to work with his band. At the end of my solo trip, he invited me to bring the UNK band someday, and said that the parents of his band students would take care of almost everything. I took the idea back to UNK’s other band director, Dr. Brian Alber, who was immediately on board with the idea. This trip would end up being a highlight of my career.
Norway’s National Day, like our 4th of July, is May 17. Parades feature prominently in the day’s celebrations, so much so that by the end of the day, we had marched about nine miles. We performed in two parades that day, one on our own and one intermixed with my friend’s band of school students aged 10-17. Marching is somewhat formal in Norway, so we adjusted the form and length of one of UNK’s drum cadences to play in the combined group so that movements could match the number of phrases that the Norwegians are used to, and that new form is still used back home today.
Our combined parade tune was Think by Aretha Franklin. The combined bands also played at two flag raising ceremonies on the National Day. We spent a couple of days before the parade rehearsing together and it was neat to see our students get to know the Norwegian students. We experienced one of their traditions early in the morning before the National Day: students from their band loudly serenaded us American band directors at around 2am. Apparently bands do this to their directors all the time on May 17.
Our home base for this trip was the town of Sandefjord, which is a two-hour bus ride south from Oslo along the coast. We were extremely tired when we finally arrived at our lodgings after flights from Omaha to Chicago to Amsterdam to Oslo, then the long bus ride to a type of church camp along an inlet from the sea. Our host band welcomed us with a musical serenade when we got off the bus, which was a great treat. The lodgings were modest but very clean and picturesque. We had our own cafeteria—four small meals per day is the usual in Norway—and were served home cooking by nice older Norwegian women throughout our stay. The food was a big surprise to many in the group, which was both funny and a bit sad. Many students had trouble identifying some of the dishes, and I remember one time where several students mistook a brown, soft cheese for peanut butter. This cafeteria also served the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life.
We were treated to several trips to tourist sites, which included a visit to an apple orchard and cidery, a silver mine from the 1700s, seeing traditional dancing and music surrounded by old Telemark houses, and two more very striking experiences: a visit to the 13th-Century Heddal stave church, and a visit to Mølen, a UNESCO Global Geopark. Here we experienced the amazing sound of boulders being constantly rolled under the sea by large waves. It is also home to many stone cairns from the Bronze Age.
St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland, 2019
This was the year of the big bomb cyclone in Nebraska. It was an especially cold and snowy winter for us, and we struggled to get out of Kearney due to the bad road conditions. We drove to Denver for this flight, which was to take us to Newark, then on to Dublin. By the time we got to the east coast, the remnants of the bomb cyclone were wreaking havoc with flights on the eastern seaboard. We were diverted to Washington, D.C. before finally landing at Newark, but not in time to make our Dublin flight.
What followed was pure misery, as we were taken to a small hotel in a small town somewhere in New Jersey by about sixteen New York City taxicabs, at around one in the morning. We were told that this hotel would have a shuttle for us to go back to Newark, which didn’t turn out to be true. Although we were able to shower and sleep, many of us had no clean clothes in our carry-on luggage. The hotelier was unable to help us, so Brian and I got out the phonebook in our room and started calling bus companies in the area. After many calls yielded no help, we luckily found a bus company that could fulfill our three needs-to take us to the airport on time in a bus big enough for our group for which the company had an available driver. It was a bit of a miracle.
The only flight we could get would be landing at the Shannon airport, which was on the other coast from Dublin. The St. Patrick’s Day Parade organizers bent over backwards to see if we could make the parade in time, but it simply was not going to work. We missed the parade by only hours, and on top of that we were all completing a 50-hour travel ordeal. The silver lining was seeing Ireland in all its greenness, which was such a welcome sight for us who had seen nothing but white and cold for many weeks.
Despite missing the big parade in Dublin, we got back on schedule as best we could. Luckily we were booked to march in another parade in Limerick on the next day, which, despite it being cold and rainy, we enjoyed greatly. There were many international bands in the Limerick parade, and we were staged near a high school band from Wisconsin and a university band from Iowa.
Non-musical activities on this trip included a tour of Dublin city center, a visit to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells and the Trinity College Library, King John’s castle in Limerick, the cliffs of Moher, which were completely socked in with fog, which was just twisting the knife at that point, and visiting a working sheep farm where we saw an amazing sheep dog demonstration before enjoying scones and tea in an old, thatched roof building, free time in Galway, a tour of the Guinness Storehouse back in Dublin, and a farewell dinner with traditional Irish music and dancing on our last night.
Despite the many travel issues on the trip, it was overall a good success. Those on the trip certainly will not forget their experience.
New Year’s Day in Dublin, 2023
We knew that we wanted another stab at a trip to Ireland almost right away once we returned from our travel-disaster laden previous attempt. This time, the travel company suggested that we try for Dublin at the New Year, as the city officials there were building a New Year’s Festival and wanted to add to the spectacle with American marching bands. The calendar worked in our favor, so we crossed our fingers and said yes.
We gathered at the music building at UNK on the evening of Christmas Day, 2022. Our trip would take us by bus to Denver, then on flights to Boston and Dublin. This was the first time since I’ve been traveling with the band that we had enough people for two coach buses. We learned our lesson to not put our performances at the beginning of trips, so we looked forward to tourist activities for a few days before two performances on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
Thankfully, our travel went fairly smoothly, and once landing in Dublin we enjoyed a bus tour of the city followed by a tour of the Guinness Storehouse. We then drove to Waterford for our first night in a hotel. The next day we took a side trip to Kilkenny, which featured a tour of the Kilkenny Castle and free time to explore the city. We then took a short drive to New Ross to tour the Dunbrody Famine Ship and see a statue of President Kennedy, who gave a speech there once. We drove back to Waterford that night.
We had most of the next day on our own to explore Waterford, which has history going back to the Viking era. We visited a medieval museum that was very impressive. We checked out of the hotel the next morning and started working our way back toward Dublin through the Wicklow mountains. We stopped at a farm to see a sheepdog demonstration on our way to Glendalough, a 6th-Century monastic historical site. It was extremely beautiful even with gale force winds, cold, and rain.
The next day we were back in Dublin and visited EPIC Ireland, the Irish Emigration Museum. That evening we staged at a downtown hotel, had a group meal, and prepared for our first performance. The Dublin New Year’s Festival was a mix of pop music concerts and firework shows, and we were the only marching band there. It was a strange performance, but the thousands of people watching us seemed to really enjoy it. Afterward, we drove back out of the city center to our hotel, where many in the group celebrated the New Year in the hotel pub.
On New Year’s Day we bussed back to the city center to give a stand-still performance at Meeting House Square, which was in the Temple Bar neighborhood. We found a quiet side street to do our warm-ups, and we were surprised that a crowd began gathering almost immediately. They seemed to really enjoy what we were doing, so we ended up giving them an impromptu performance of our pep band songs. We basically repeated the show in the square, then we had free time in the city center for the rest of the afternoon.
Our trip home went smoothly, that is until we landed in Denver. It was the middle of the night and a large storm was blowing in from Nebraska. Our bus drivers wanted to attempt the trip home, but it quickly became apparent that it would be too dangerous. Miraculously, we were able to find a hotel in Fort Morgan that had a lot of rooms available in the middle of the night. It turned out that we were just not meant to have a smooth trip after all. The next day the storm blew out, and we carefully made the drive back to Kearney.