DCI World Championships

I found out about the existence of Drum Corps International when I was drum major of my high school marching band. The championships are usually televised (although not live), and since I discovered this around 10 years ago and started watching, I've always sort of wanted to go. They work so hard! It looks fun! Then I got cancer, which caused me to more intentionally start doing things I've always sort of wanted to do. My mom mentioned it in early February this year and I looked into it and tickets were already almost sold out! Hotels, too. We bought tickets and booked the whole thing immediately and then had to wait many months for it to be time to go to Indianapolis.

One of the cancer friends I made on breastcancer.org lives in Indianapolis, so when I got there we met up for beers & snacks. She is GREAT. It's such an amazing thing, how going through this binds you with strangers in such a deep and immediate way.

Then I walked over to the Hilton to meet up with my family.

We brought Mira along, for her first ever girls' weekend. She was a good sport about being drug around a random US city to attend an event she didn't care about! It was raining, but we ran through the rain to a pizza place down the block for dinner.

On Saturday we got up for some Indianapolis sightseeing. Downtown Indianapolis is pretty!

This is the Soldiers & Sailors Monument. You can take an elevator to the top.

OR, you can save your $2 and take the stairs. It's 33 flights. How bad could it be?

It was super rough, and hot at the top. But we all made it and the views were great!

This picture kills me because everyone is so smiley. In reality we were sweaty and exhausted.

After we walked back down the 33 flights of stairs we sat down for a little break. My legs hurt for three days after this.

We went over to the war museum, which was in a very nice building, and wandered around there for an hour or so. We watched an extremely lengthy video on the Indian wars of the 1700s in which I realized for the first time in my 40 years of life that INDIANA comes from INDIAN.

Then we went to The Eagle for lunch. It's a fried chicken place and was terrific. We got a bunch of different carby sides to split and Mira even ate a tiny bite of corn bread.

We found out Indianapolis has a little canal through downtown like San Antonio.

Hillary successfully propped her iPhone up on her purse to get a group shot!

Finally IT WAS TIME. The tickets said the event started at 4:55, so we walked to the stadium to discover the first corps wasn't actually until 6:30. They started with a bunch of awards presentations and performances by other bands, including the U.S. Marine Drum & Bugle Corps.

Then we got to see four hours of marching bands. The ones at the beginning had scored the lowest in preliminaries, and tended to be flashier with more focus on color guard and props than actually playing and performing music. One of them had a weirdly overt Christian theme with people reading Bible verses and a shirtless Jesus running around.

The last three - the top three from the preliminaries - were amazing, way above the rest of the pack. The crowd was really hilarious to watch, too. People take this extremely seriously.

In the end, all the corps come back onto the field for the awards ceremony and have to stand at attention while everyone files in. It took a long time, man. It was 11:00pm and we were tired.

In the end, the Blue Devils - the Yankees/Patriots of Drum Corps International - won. We were hoping for a little excitement with an upset because the second place corps (Santa Clara Vanguard) was also incredible, but alas.

The next morning I was on a 7:30 flight and was home back in my pajamas by 10:00am! It was a great way to spend the weekend and to initiate Mira into our girls' trips.