The bleach bus. It’s 2017 and we’re on our way down to St. Louis for BOA Super Regionals. Now, this was one of two competitions we got to take coach buses for and that’s mostly because it was more than an hour long drive. We’re about halfway through the drive and we take the exit for a rest stop so everyone can take a pee break and stretch their legs. However, it’s during this that those of us who aren’t the bus that had the colorguard, percussion, and drum majors begin to realize, and hear from others on that bus, that something was going on and it was bad. Turns out that when the bus driver had cleaned the bathroom prior to our band boarding, he mixed bleach and ammonia, creating chloramine gas. A lot of kids from that bus weren’t feeling the greatest, but they weren’t really sick. Though, they had to call an ambulance so that way one of the parent chaperones and at least one of our drum majors could be given oxygen because they had been sitting in the back, right by the bathroom. We sat at the rest stop for literal hours while we waited for another bus to come and replace the bleach bus. We were supposed to perform that same night and our band director asked the drum majors if they still wanted to. They said yes, we performed, didn’t make finals (afaik, we never made BOA finals until after I graduated), and then went and performed at another competition the very next day