Europe: Day 4 (July 8)

We had a late morning this morning, which allowed me to get a good amount of sleep! but after breakfast, we loaded the buses and traveled to the "Old Town" part of Innsbruck. We got to mozy around the town in groups and check out lots of the local stores. My group stopped by several shops, buying miscellaneous items for ourselves and others. After that, we stopped by a gelateria, where we were treated to a delicious serving of gelato. After that, we stopped by a local grocer and picked up some sandwiches and other things for lunch. After that, we got back on the bus and took a short ride to this magnificent church where we were fortunate enough to hear the choir sing a few of their pieces. Their sound was heavenly! After about half an hour of exploring the church, we got back to the bus for our 3 hour ride to Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. Once we arrived at the hotel, we got settled into our very comfortable and pretty room. We got dressed into our concert attire, headed to dinner a very generous Italian dinner. Following dinner, we got on the bus to the concert hall for tonight, next to the prior Olympic Ice Skating Arena. We spent a rather healthy amount of time setting up for the performance. Being on sound crew, we had to run all these wires to and from the microphones to the mixer box, tape the cords down so nobody would trip over them, and move the empty equipment boxes out of sight. Our concert went pretty well, in my opinion. Unfortunately, our concert ran EXTREMELY late. WE ended up finishing the entire program at 11:20pm. We had to run an extremely fast tear-down routine, but of course, what can go wrong always will go wrong. As we were loading the bus, I began to notice a few small raindrops. No big deal. But eventually, the drops began to grow larger and fell faster. Within 10 minutes, it was a total downpour. Most of the people that were supposed to help with the truck loading had ran inside to seek shelter from the rain, but their absence caused the loading process to take even longer. Additionally, I was in my entire uniform, which included a dry-clean only tie and my suit coat. After getting back to the hotel well after scheduled (around 12:30), I hung my stuff up to dry, got ready for bed, and hoped my clothes would dry out before I had to pack up my suitcase for departure the next morning. All my clothes were dry except for my pants, which I just brought with me and hung on the bus to completely dry. I was planning on doing laundry soon, but I guess nature took care of me that night!