First off… I realize I said in yesterday’s post “USC” instead of “UNC”… sorry… my bad. I was actually falling asleep while I was writing the post. (I fixed it already…)

On Friday we drove to Morehead & Atlantic Beach, NC! The plan was to arrive at Shepherd of the Sea Church in Atlantic Beach around noon and then go play at the beach until about 3:00pm or so. That happened… but when we rolled up in the church parking lot we found out that they weren’t expecting us until Saturday! There was a mix-up in our communications… the really cool thing is that they started calling everyone in their church and telling them to come at 7:30pm on Friday instead of Saturday and we had a pretty good turnout! The congregation made us an excellent BBQ meal of burgers and dogs and we ate until we were full… and then some!

Here’s a video of that and some of our concert!

The beach was a rockin’ good time! We played in the waves and swallowed a bunch of salt water. We had the chance to walk around the town of Atlantic Beach as well… there was a nice little diner that I got to eat at! Then we went to Wings and The Blue Reef… they’re both beach-side tourist stores that have a lot of organized junk in them. J Awesome!

Alex, Brad and I decided that we needed to have some tour pets to bring us closer together as a group. The below video explains the lowdown on that!

As the day came to a close we were fortunate enough to get to stay at a Hampton Inn in Morehead, NC. A clean bed and a warm shower were much appreciated after a couple nights on gymnasium floors! We’re on the bus again on our way to Charlotte, NC as I write this and we’re all clean and well rested!

Here’s pictures from today.

More later!

Sang at Hillcrest… walked around Franklin Street near UNC… saw the Duke Chapel (sang in it)

Thursday was a really cool day! We got to give our concert at Hillcrest Convalescent Home in Durham, NC. We had a chance to talk with some of the residents there and they were really happy to have us! One lady exclaimed, “You keep singing!”

Then we made our way to Chapel Hill, NC and walked up and down Franklin street by UNC. There was a lot of light blue going on around there… you’d think they won a championship back in April or something?!?! The campus was very nice looking and very large. If you ever get the chance… go to the UNC campus and visit Franklin Street. There are a ton of cool little shops there and we were able to spend a few hours walking around. Us mentors found a Mexican restaurant in an ally that was very similar to Potter’s Place in downtown Naperville. I had an excellent taco. The picture to the right is of the library (I think) on the UNC campus. There are more pictures of UNC in the slideshow below.

After UNC we made our way across town to Duke. Yeah… we hit up both rival schools in the same day! We didn’t have a lot of time at Duke before we had to leave. But we did get to see the Duke chapel! We walked around the chapel for a little while and found out that we get to do an impromptu choir concert!!! There happened to be another choir group touring the chapel too… they were from Orange Park United Methodist Church from Orange Park, FL which is near Jacksonville, FL and Lynn Panosh has been friends with their choir director Mark for over 20 years!!! Crazy coincidence!!!

It was just so cool to run into another youth choir and to see the kids get so excited to sing for their peers. Not only did they get to experience the acoustics and the incredible singing venue of a chapel but they got to sing for peers that they had never met and then appreciate what each other were doing. And the coolest thing was that they found they had songs in common that they could sing together!

-Lynn Panosh

Here’s some pictures from the day!

I’ve typed up some fun facts about the Duke University Chapel after the jump. (after the jump means after you click the below link… if you’re looking at this specific post and not just the blog home page you can disreguard this message)

Continue Reading…

Hey Everyone! It’s currently Friday morning… somewhere near 2:00am. I just finished uploading the videos from days 2 and 3 to YouTube so here they are! I’ve written down notes of what happened on Thursday (Day 4) but I don’t have time to write out an entire blog post about it right now… I need to get a few hours of sleep before we wake up and do it all over again! We’re going to the Atlantic Ocean beach on Friday! I’m hoping to be able to lie in the sun and get some more sleep… I’ll have Thursday’s summary posted hopefully by Saturday morning for you.

Thanks for your patience…

These first two videos were recorded in the bus as we were on our way to our white water rafting adventure.

Hi Parents – Part 1

Hi Parents – Part 2

The following video was taken on Wednesday as we sang our first concert… this video accompanies this blog post.

Behind The Scenes – Day 3