C’Ville (Virginia)
Hello from Charlottesville. The view from where I’m sitting is incredible… open swaths of pasture, dense lush deciduous green woods running up the sides of the mountains surrounding… and giant bees the size of horses (slight hyperbole, but not much) buzzing around. We’re going to head into town shortly to grab some lunch, but for the moment we’re spending the late morning taking in beautiful sights and a nice cool breeze out in the country at the farm we’re staying at. I’d guess the temperature to be around 68 right now – perfect.
Our show last night was fun, though we pulled into town at 9:50pm for a 10pm gig… not ideal. We had to scramble to load all of the equipment, run our own sound, etc., in a 15 minute period. The result was a set where I couldn’t hear anything but drums (no time to set up monitors), and everyone else basically heard themselves (amp’d instruments) + drums. Makes it hard to connect with one another that way, and I certainly have no idea what the sound was like for the audience. About 3 songs into the set, the bartender came over and asked us to turn everything down a bit, which is also distracting… oh, well. We played well, though, and we had people coming up afterwards to say that they really enjoyed it, so that’s good times. We’ll be playing in Charlottesville quite a bit later this year and into 2010, so we’ll have plenty of opportunities to play rooms with house sound, etc.
We’ve decided not to go to Memphis today, because we were going to be playing a private event there, and upon looking at the tripometer and the route to Memphis, it’s a bit too much of a hassle to get down there. It’s a 13 hour drive from Charlottesville, and then we’d be driving 7 hours backwards (Northeast) to play Ohio tomorrow. We were all looking forward to seeing Memphis, but we did the math on that, too, and we would have had zero time to walk around the city to see things. We’re going to hop online and see if any last-minute gig opportunities present themselves in Charleston, West Virginia or maybe even here in C’ville… if not, we’ll relax for the night and hit the road to Ohio in the morning.
Anton gave me a bunch of photos from Vermont, so I’m going to publish them below in the Vermont post… scroll down to check them out.
More later from C’ville…