The adventure started off as me and Jonathon Sarofeen, started our trek to Buffalo, on Thursday night of the championship week. We planned on staying at Brian Schell's Aunt's house overnight and leaving in the morning. Since, Brian said that they lived halfway between Jersey and Buffalo, around the Syracuse area. Needless to say, Brian was wrong. His aunt and uncle lived about 40 minutes north of Albany. Also, needless to say, it still forced us to drive 10 hours to Buffalo in one stint. Jonathon and I arrived just in time for the Glassmen's performance (about an hour after the start of semi-finals.)
During Saturday morning and afternoon (after a night of heavy drinking) we went to find where the Cadets were practicing at SUNY (of which there turned out to be 3 of them in the area.) During our search for the right SUNY, Jonathon puked at one SUNY and came very close to puking at another SUNY, which earned him the nickname of, “The SUNY Yacker.”
By the end of the show Saturday night, we realized we were having some monetary problems (we didn't have enough) that might inhibit us from returning home. We both wanted to buy souvenirs but needed to save our cash for the trip home. Then I remembered I has brought my checkbook (containing all rubber checks) and I proceeded to write bad checks for souvenirs to any corps that would accept personal checks. I saved one check in case we could find a place that would cash it to help us get home.
We had no luck finding a place to cash the check, and had spent the last of our money for food Sunday morning. We took an alternate route home (the other one was a toll road) which looked shorter on the map. Well it wasn't, it turned out to run through the farmlands of upstate New York. We managed to find a country gas station (right before we would have run out of gas) and actually managed to scrape up $9.00 in loose change to buy some gas and prayed that it would be enough to get us home. We kept on driving until the gas completely ran out, somewhere on I-390 in eastern Pennsylvania (the Poconos region.) We took turns pushing the car to the nearest civilization (we never did reach it) until a State Trooper saw us and called for a tow truck. Thank God we both had AAA Plus cards on us, whose membership privileges include 100 miles of free towing. To our surprise, the tow truck driver agreed to tow us all the way to Jonathon's house in Bayville, New Jersey (near Tom's River.) We used his card for the first 100 miles and mine for the rest. We arrived at his house at 6 a.m. Monday morning. I had to borrow $10.00 from his mom in order to put gas in my car so I could get home. I finally made it home that afternoon. This is one weekend I'll never forget!
Tom Pohl, Baritone, 1992 to present
