Marching in Florida

Florida is an amazing place in the winter compared to Iowa, 85 degrees on Monday and in the mid seventies for the next five days. Our hotel was amazing, five stars and we actually had three rooms in our hotel suite. Like always the beds are soft and the pillows fluffed. I realized about halfway through our trip that we were actually using air conditioning in our hotel room, for some reason these was amazing to me, especially since it was winter and in Iowa we had our heater cranked up.
The view from our hotel room was over an amazing couple acre golf course, the pool, hot tub, volleyball and tennis courts. It was quite beautiful and reminded me of a very picturesque painting. I was quite overwhelmed by the fact that I was staying in a beautiful five star hotel with about twenty good friends and a hundred others. On top of all that I had successfully made my first ever flight without my parents being there.
We all looked forward to the amazing week in paradise, though it would have been wonderful to have a few hours just to relax at the hotel. We got to go to the MGM studios, Planet Hollywood, Downtown Disney, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, and the Magical Kingdom, all in a four day period. We went to Cocoa Beach on the very last day, though it was only 65 degrees and like a lot of other people I opted out of swimming because of the freezing temperature of the water.
The only downside many of us saw to the week, was the fact that we had to march in two different parades in the same day, totaling a distance of about six miles, in seventy-five degree weather. Our marching uniforms are made out of wool and they are quite thick. In fact they are designed to keep us as warm as possible, in Iowa, that isn't such a bad thing, but in Florida, oh god we were sweating before we even had our uniforms on.
The Citrus Bowl Parade we were in was a disaster, half the band was out of step and it was televised, we barely even knew our music, but somehow we got through it. The Magical Kingdom parade, was AMAZING, it was probably the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. We marched down the streets of Disney towards a fully lit Disney castle and I think we played perfectly every time. We were all astonished by the thousands of people inside Disney watching us and after the parade our band teacher who was on the verge of tears made a speech about how proud of all of us doing such a wonderful job that day. I swear if one more thing would have happened we all would have been in tears.