Over Thanksgiving break, hundreds of Homewood Patriot Marching Band members traveled to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. for three days of fun and performance. 

The band marched through the Magic Kingdom in Disney’s Imagination Campus Parade on their final day at the parks. The parade route spans just under a mile through the park’s most popular areas, including under the famous Cinderella Castle and down Main Street. 

These smaller band trips, relative to their trips such as Ireland and California, are more relaxed and less logistically challenging.

Junior drum major Becca Pearson enjoys all of the HPMB trips, big or small. She particularly enjoyed how action-packed their limited time at Disney was.

“We went to Hollywood Studios the day before the parade, and Magic Kingdom the day of,” Pearson said.

As the HPMB band is nationally known, they have little trouble getting accepted to perform at lower-stake parades. This makes these trips lower pressure, which is why they alternate between “big trips” and “little trips” every other year. 

Chris Cooper, the Band Director at HHS said “It’s good for us as directors to not have to do [bigger trips] every year.”

Other trips like the one to Ireland, representing not just Homewood as a school, but America as a whole add a lot of pressure on the band’s facilitators. 

“But we also thrive on that stuff. We love it,” Cooper said.

While the smaller trips allow more freedom for band members to roam around, the students still hold themselves accountable. In an impressive 24 minutes, the students were all dressed, packed, loaded and ready for the parade.

On this trip, the band continued to represent Homewood extremely well.  

Cooper said, “I came back from that, more proud than any other trip we’ve been on.”