Pom Nationals: The Series of Unfortunate Events
See how the Pom team spends their time stuck in airports for 24 hours
Stella DeLong '24
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On February 9th, the Muscatine High School Dance Team took their first trip to Nationals in Florida to what we thought would be a memorable trip, little did we know that the actual trip there might be the most memorable.
We had to be at the high school to leave for the airport at 3:00 am. We loaded the vans and took off for the Cedar Rapids Airport, which is where things took a turn for the worst.
Our flight was scheduled for around 7:00 am, so we boarded around 6:30 am. But time went by and we were just sitting there for a long time. The pilot gave us updates throughout the few hours we were on the plane. Around 9:00 am we were told we had to go back to the gate to wait for the storm to clear.
Since we knew it could be a while before we got to leave, the team tried to stay occupied by catching up on homework, playing games, and sleeping since it was so early.
The team at the Cedar Rapids Airport, bright and early
Finally after a couple of hours we got bored of the plane and took off shortly after.
The team made it to Chicago about 3 hours after originally scheduled. But the staff was able to work with us and we got a flight. Well, we got a flight but not to our destination. We had to go to North Carolina for another layover. The team urgently boarded the flight to Charlotte.
The flight to NC went smoothly and we got there a few hours later. We landed around 4:00pm. We were all happy because we had time to get food and relax for a little bit until our coach told us that we had a 5 hour layover.
We were all happy that we had a flight but all we wanted was to get to Florida. We all dispersed to get food, and did our own thing for a while.
All of a sudden our parent group chat started going crazy. They were saying that our flight was canceled online. The team started to get really nervous. Our coach went to find the staff and see what she could do.
The airport staff assured us that they had a flight for us in North Carolina so we felt much better. We waited at the gate for 2 more hours until a new staff member came up to us asking what our flight number was, and told us that the flight was canceled hours ago.
We were all mad because they had told us that it wasnt and said they would give us updates if anything changed. There were a lot of emotions because we were so scared that we wouldn't have a flight.
Nicky was trying to figure it out while the team stayed back. She ended up getting us another flight to Florida but it was in 10 minutes.
The team making a run for it
We immediately got up, trying to make sure we had the whole team. Picking up all of our belongings and then we started running. Of course the gate was on the complet other side of this huge airport.
The team was feeling a lot of stress and emotions but we had hope we would make it. We finally made it to our gate. We got on right away and had a smooth flight from there.
It was a very scary and long 24 hour day in airports around the world. We were all just happy we finally made it to florida. We got our luggage and got on the bus to go to our hotel. It was a reliving moment knowing we could finally sleep.
But after all of that we couldn't even sleep in because we had to be ready to compete at 7:00am. But very grateful we made it in time to compete.
Overall we had a great time at nationals despite the chaos at the airport. We ended with 4th for prop, 7th in kick, and 11th in pom. We made fun memories, became closer as a team, and learned new things. We hope that this opportunity we had can make the Pom Team better in the future.
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