September 2010

Anton’s driving and I’m updating the Journal here from the passenger seat, cruising westbound on I-80 through Nebraska. Really fun show at Doane College at lunchtime. The students were awesome, the staff at the school were awesome, and we made some new fans and friends for sure. We signed a few autographs, gave away an SR hoodie to a girl who guessed correctly what the item is in the TTA cd artwork, sold some CD’s, and we expect to see a bunch of new “RBT” sticker photos come through from Crete in the coming weeks and months. There were some kids singing along to “Don” and ‘Hazel” right from the start, which is cool to see. All in all, a really fun day and well worth the trip. Here’s how the setlist panned out:

Message In A Bottle
Story Of
From The World I Have Known
Hazel
ZED
IIOKYN
View From Way Up Here
Don
Turn My Egg
Nightlite Jesus
Blame
Years Ago

We swung by the Kava House restaurant in downtown Crete at the recommendation of some Doane students, and enjoyed some sandwiches before heading out of town. I also picked up a new t-shirt to add to my collection, which is quite awesome.

We’re driving by silos and blurry cows and cornfields, under grey skies. No rain yet, so it’s actually nice driving weather. We’ve had good luck on the last couple of trips across the midwest and west.

Next week we play in Denver, and then we head to the Western slope (western side) of Colorado, playing another college show and club show. A week after that, we’re planning a trip to Virginia to play around DC, Virginia, and North Carolina – details TBA on that as soon as we get it all confirmed.

Some pics from the road:

Downtown Crete

Doane!

Doane!

Lunch

Anton LOVES this place.

Salad. Water. Hot Chocolate. Chicken. Fries. Mmm.

New t-shirt.

Wednesday, September 8 – 2:49am Crete, Nebraska time
Greetings from the Super 8 Motel in Crete, NE. Anton and I arrived an hour or so ago, after an easy 80 mph-cruise-control-on-the-entire-way drive from Boulder. We took a spin around this small town (6k people) tonight, looking for the hotel. Seems like a funny little place – a giant factory at one end of town, some train tracks, and Doane College (where we play tomorrow) at the other end. Definitely a western agricultural feel to it, with feed stores and a Walmart dominating the commercial scene. It was amazing to see how far East the smoke from the Boulder Fourmile fire has gone… we were well past civilization in Eastern Colorado tonight and still seeing the smoke line.

We play at noon tomorrow in the Campus Center, evidently a place where the students go for lunch, so there should be a nice little built-in crowd. Doane is a tiny school of maybe 1,500 kids or so. We met them and booked this show through the St. Paul college booking convention covered in some earlier road journal entries.

Okay – bed time… more tomorrow after the show. We’ll leave you with a photo from downtown Crete:

Family Martial Arts Dance

Hello from the road. We were up and out of the hotel at 6am this morning as planned, swung by the airport in Green Bay, and we’re now just outside of Madison, en route to Colorado. Overcast day today with some thunderstorms, but overall the weather looks like it will be okay crossing the plains. We might hit some severe stuff in Nebraska this afternoon, but it’s too early to tell. We’re circling the city of Madison right now, can see the big white dome of the state capitol. Beers is driving, Anton’s in the back, and I’m riding shotgun. Since none of us got much sleep last night, we’re doing the ‘2 driver’ rule all day and night today. One person gets to sleep in the back bench row, the other two sit up front and keep each other awake and alert. It’s really hard to picture going to sleep in Boulder tonight, staring at Wisconsin license plates everywhere – but that’s the plan. More updates later if we have anything interesting to report.

Wow, what a great night we had here in DePere. Shortly after the last Road Journal post below, we drove about 2 minutes, over to the Campus Center at St. Norbert. The building sits on the banks of the Fox River, and the room where we played had a nice big stage with large windows looking down on the river, a room full of couches and chairs, and a nice lighting rig. Fred ran the lights during the set, and we played for about 2 hours. We’ve got a new ending on “Turn My Egg” that we arranged in the studio back in Colorado, and we played it tonight to close out the show. The students were awesome and seemed to have a really good time. We unloaded a whole bunch of merch, made a bunch of new fans (many of them freshmen), and one art student even drew a pencil sketch of Anton during the show, which he gave to us afterwards. After the show, we came back to the hotel to freshen up, and then met some of the students at the Kewaunee, a bar up the street from campus. Really nice people there, too, and we enjoyed hot wings, cold beers, and great company right up until about a half an hour ago. Now we’re back at the hotel watching some random Cameron Diaz movie and about to fall asleep for 3 hours. We get up at 5:45am and climb into the van by 6am, to drive 18 hours straight back to Colorado. Not a trip that any of us are looking forward to, but it is what it is.  🙂   I’ll post some updates from the van during the drive. We’re dropping Fred and Jay at the Green Bay airport in the morning to fly to Boston and Virginia respectively, and Beers, Anton, and I (Russ) will make the long drive back to the Rockies.