April 25, 2009

Saturday, April 25 – 12:15pm Watertown, NY time
Okay, so the “ahead of schedule” thing might not apply anymore… nice string of 1,000 bikers just cut in front of us here… good times.

By the way, we’re in the middle of nowhere up here…

More later, after the gig… hasta!

Anton’s camera at the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame…

 

Good morning, all. Our great trip continues, and great weather… nice 70-degree air blowing through the van windows right now as we make our way North to waaaay upstate New York for the show at St. Lawrence University. Anton’s driving, Beers is hitting his practice pad in the shotgun seat, Fred’s snoozing on the 1st bench, I’m sitting in the 2nd bench, and Jay is playing his bass w/headphones in the back row. We stayed outside of Syracuse last night, grabbing the last two available rooms in the Comfort Inn… unfortunately they were smoking rooms, so we’re all a little funky today. Our hotel room bathroom was interesting… toilet didn’t flush without overflowing, and the shower flooded up to mid-shin before starting to drain. Fun times. Sunny blue skies above, though, and we’re making really good time right now… should be getting there a bit early so we can chill on campus for a bit.

We’ve made a habit on this tour of missing the continental breakfasts at the hotels (but the positive side of that is that it means we’re getting decent sleep). We’ve also had a couple of left-behind items, which is a bummer. Fred left his $100 headphones in the room last night, and I left my wireless internet antenna at the Best Western in Columbus, OH… meaning that I’m on a significantly weaker signal for posting these Road Journal updates… but on the East Coast the coverage is typically much better, so we shouldn’t miss a beat here.

The scenery is definitely putting us in “East Coast” mode… driving through acres and acres of woods, rivers, streams, etc… and the occasional big open field… but mainly woods on all sides right now. Really nice.

We have an hour long set tonight, not sure yet what we’ll be playing, but most likely some stuff that we can open up and jam on a bit, as we’ve gotten word that the crowd will likely be into some open tunes. Our contract says that the show is outdoors, weather dependent. I think it’s safe to say that the weather is just about perfect… it will feel like a summer festival. Woot.

The university is putting us up in a hotel somewhere near Potsdam tonight, along with feeding us. These are the nice contracts to get. We have tomorrow (Sunday) off… no show, nowhere to be… so we’re thinking about heading into the Adirondack Park Preserve to hike and camp for the night. It will depend on the weather tomorrow, as we don’t have any camping gear, so we’ll be sleeping out under the stars if we do it. A nice campfire and open air snooze sounds really good. Monday we’d have about a 3 hour drive to Burlington from there, so not bad at all. Enough time for us to get a good sleep, cook some breakfast on the fire, and get to Burlington in time to hang some fliers and maybe do some busking downtown to promote the show.

More later… I’m going to upload Anton’s photos now… all in this batch are from around the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.