DAY 3

Columbia, SC

Sunday, March 1

Confession. Ajay got up this morning at 8:30 am to study for his biochem exam. I did not. My alarm, originally set for 9:15 am, was snoozed no less than 10 times, therefore playing the first 10-30 seconds of our “Sandcastles” recording enough times for me to almost get sick of Kyle’s voice. We left Knoxville by noon and proceeded to our next destination, Columbia, South Carolina.

The third consecutive 4 hour drive hit on many levels. There was a brief encounter with Officer John Doe and a John Doberman in the parking lot of a Ingles! grocery store. No humans, dogs or driving records were injured during the journey.

We arrived in Columbia and met up with Cockappella, a co-ed a cappella group at the University of South Carolina. After a quick meetup at one of their members’ apartments, we broke off for dinner while they had rehearsal. Spencer, Adreesh, Ian, Tiger, David and I got sushi and things got spicy real quick. Spencer was feeling particularly frugal and ate an unwise amount of wasabi in exchange for Venmo payments to cover his meal. Ask him personally if it was worth it.

Cockappella invited us to the last 30 minutes of the rehearsal to share some tunes and laughs. They performed a thrilling Michael Jackson medley and their ICCA set. Adreesh was able to pick out their ICCA set theme of “stolen songs”. Y’all should check out their performance with choreo here, it’s super dope. Their energy was contagious and their bass section was vibin hard. After rehearsal, we hitched a ride in the back of Max’s F-150 and had a chill get together to close out the night.

This concludes the first weekend of tour and it’s been awesome meeting such great groups along the way. Much more to come! #PBG

- Brian