My blurb for the North Tunnel Echo about the Maryland trip

"I didn't know our trip destination got changed to Taipei."

That was the first thing I thought of upon exiting the doors of the Baltimore/Washington International Airport. The other band members around me similarly pondered why we had flown into a tropical rain forest instead of Maryland. Standing outside waiting for the bus to pick us up, I literally watched a layer of sweat form on the skin of my arm within five minutes.

Quite a welcome for a bunch of spoiled coastal Californians.

Aside from the three-showers-a-day degree of humidity and heat, our trip to Maryland was definitely one of the more memorable trips I've been on, mostly because there were actually things to do other than waste time watching TV in the hotel room (I'm looking at you, Pullman and Corvallis).

Taking the Metrorail into the National Mall area of DC was an adventure in an of itself. A warning: if you ever find yourself getting onto the Metro from the Rosslyn station in Arlington, DO NOT LOOK DOWN while on the escalator. You'll lose all sense of balance and stumble to a horrifying, long-term-hospital-stay-inducing state, because it's the longest escalator in the world (I haven't looked it up on Wikipedia to confirm, so it's probably not true, but you get the point). The ride from the top to the bottom took a full two minutes and three seconds (margin of error: three seconds caused by the initial shock of how freaking scary the ride was). The other shocking part? The Metro ride took all of six minutes. For comparison, it takes about 15 minutes for a BART ride from Downtown Berkeley to San Francisco.

Walking around seeing all the famous national monuments at night for the first time in my life was a pretty incredible experience, especially because we made the rather poor decision of walking all the way from the Lincoln Memorial to the Jefferson Memorial and back around, making our total walking distance for the night about five miles.

This blurb, of course, would be incomplete without mention of the actual football game itself, so I'll say this: the stadium was small but homey, the Maryland fans were warm and welcoming, and the general atmosphere of the home crowd after the game was, "Did we just win?"

What made this trip truly memorable, however, was the sheer number of recent Cal Band alumni - I counted about thirty, but there were probably more - who attended the game, many of them now East Coast transplants. Many of us were graced with the opportunity to revisit with bandsmen whom we had not seen since our first year in band. Every one of them was just as passionate and excited to be at the game as when they were in the band - it's always reassuring to see a familiar face in unfamiliar territories. If that kind of networking and dedication doesn't say Go Bears, I don't know what does.