Green Bay, WI –> Boulder, CO
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.
St. Norbert Rocks. (De Pere, Wisconsin)
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.