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Greetings and thanks again for your interest in our next segment of “On the Road”. I would like to thank everyone for all of the prayers, and concerns about my bout with pneumonia the past few weeks. I was under the weather for quite some time and I had missed one weekend trip with the group. We had a cancellation last week due to weather so our segment of “On The Road” comes to you a week later than our regularly scheduled segment. The Singing Echoes are in Mississippi this weekend and we are currently stopped once again at what has to be the sixth or seventh Wal-Mart I have seen since we left yesterday morning. I want to share with everyone what has to be one of the most unique experiences of the group in our recent travels.

First off please remember that we travel long hours and many miles on our bus and there are certain maintenance related issues that we have to deal with at almost a daily basis while traveling. One of these “maintenance related issues” is dumping our black water waste tanks. The black water tanks have certain profuse odors in which you have to account for by pouring a deodorizing chemical back into your facilities. Which is a round about way of saying when something gets full you have to empty it and account for what you intend putting back in to your facilities. There was a particular day we were to empty this “black” water tank and it happened to be my turn to perform our “maintenance related issue”.

At first I removed the cover from our facilities and took went to the special place allocated for dumping this water. I was doing such a great job at first you have never seen anybody dump water like me. Yes I had finished this portion of the process and I started back to the bus to put our facilities back together.

I grabbed the 8-ounce bottle of “blue” chemical and I began poring it in without paying much attention. Oh, this was another task I did well. I did a very good job at this task. This may have been the task I did the best. The task that I didn’t quite do so well is putting the lid up correctly on our facilities.

The bottle was empty and the floor was covered in blue chemical. If it was just a mess to clean up it may not be such a bad task but this blue chemical is designed to cover up bad smells. The overwhelming smell began to not only fill the room but the entire bus. No one on the bus realized what the smell was until they looked down the hall and discovered my new blue birthmarks on my hands. Everyone on the bus began coughing, crying, gagging and trying to wave the smell from the air! We would have laughed if we had enough air supply to survive laughing while the smell filled the air.

I am told that in the front lounge of our bus that my father was reading his bible as tears began to flow down his face. Oh, many times has this happened but as Josh looked over to view these tears he couldn’t help but know that these tears were chemically induced this time. Adam was the driver at the time of the incident and he opened our 12’’ by 5’’ inch window to try and get some fresh air inside our bus. This may have worked on a rotten banana or a three-week-old bag of garbage but this was a smell like no other. This 8-ounce bottle of chemical is what they used to paint the Statue of Liberty. This stuff could be considered a weapon of mass destruction. This smell singed nose hairs; this smell would grow hair on a dead man. This smell was in the truest since of the word breathtaking.

I also have to mention that to clean this blue chemical out of the floor I had to grab the closest towel available, Jeremy’s blue sparkly towel to be exact. When I was through it wasn’t a bit sparkly and had became a liiiittle bluer! The assassination of Jeremy’s bath towel was quite amusing to me as the blue chemical began to disappear from the floor but not from the air.

I think it needless to say but when you have a funny moment you always think of the show that many people had made money sending in home videos and the audience voting on which one was the funniest. This was one case in which the Singing Echoes would have won HANDS DOWN!

A few months later, my blue birthmark all but gone and the assassination of Jeremy’s towel now over but certainly not forgotten, I can recall everyone’s reaction to this day. I have on occasion been again asked to perform our “maintenance related issue” but no one will ever let me live down the day Jeremy’s Bath Towel died!

That is “On the Road” with the Singing Echoes and I am Matthew Epperson.