October 23, 2010

Quick update… we just checked into our hotel for the night. We picked a random exit in North Platte (saw a bunch of hotel signs from the interstate). I hopped out of the van and ran in to check availability of rooms, and had a deja vu moment. The guy working the night shift came out and I recognized him. He looked me up in the computer and sure enough, we stayed here recently. He asked if we wanted the “newly renovated” rooms. I said, “Shore.” As we got to the rooms, we realized that we’re staying at the “Asbestos Removal Zone” hotel again (see Road Journal post below from August 28th). Funny, and completely random. No barricaded hallways this time, though my room does smell like it was just painted an hour ago. We’ll have sweet dreams tonight. Later, skaters.

We’re on the road to home… I-80… westbound… somewhere near Cozad. Had a long drive this morning, pulling out of the Grand Forks hotel parking lot at 8:00am, covering the southern half of North Dakota, all of South Dakota, and the northern half of Nebraska. For our readers on the East Coast, these are LARGE states. We basically drove the equivalent of Boston to D.C., played a show at Doane College, and then hit the road again to get to where we are now. Yay. The story of tour – drive for 10 hours, play for 2, drive for 10 more.

The kids at Doane were gracious to have us back as a full band (Anton and I played duo there 6 weeks ago). While our drive started out rainy in North Dakota today, the weather in Nebraska was pleasant enough that we were able to play outdoors, outside their Student Center building, under some really nice tall old trees and by a waterfall/fountain thing. Pretty peaceful, to say the least. There was a Halloween Zombie event going on, where a bunch of students were dressed as zombies and another bunch were dressed as zombie killers (tossing stuffed socks at the zombies), and another group dressed as “survivors.” The only way to tell the difference between a zombie “victim” (aka a “zombie”) and a “survivor” was that the survivors wore a red hankerchief on their arm. Zombies wore them on their legs, a la Punky Brewster. So while we played our set, we observed some zombies get killed and some perfectly nice college students converted to zombies. Regardless, we got a dozen or so zombies to get up and dance to View, the end of Park, and Wartime… so all was good. The acoustics in the amphitheater (as it’s called) were actually remarkably good. It may have been the best sound we had the entire little run. A perfect amount of reverb between the buildings and trees. We made some more fans, got some more CD’s out, ate some chicken strips and cookies for dinner in their cafeteria and then hit the road, actually going backwards for a bit to drop Jay at the airport in Lincoln. He’s flying back to Virginia in the morning, as we press on westward to Colorado. We’re going to try to make it to North Platte tonight, or maybe Ogallala if we’re up to it – but it’s been a long day in the van. Here are some photos from today:

a grey start to our drive south out of North Dakota. backtracking yesterday’s route.

blurry (wet) cows.

double rainbow!!! (minus 1)

say hello to the camera.

jay driving the first shift, Anton reading the news. rainy day in the van. flat landscape. yip.

fred gives his best ‘grey rainy’ look.

3 of these were the only times we slowed below 70mph. cruise control and blurry cows.

at doane, beers finds a nice place in the trees to warm up pre-show.

our fountain companion (it was right behind Beers’ drum kit)

anton and beers and trees.

beers’ practice spot, zoomed out. NICE campus at doane. feels like east coast or something.

More from the road tomorrow… we’ll have about 4 hours to Denver, and hopefully uneventful, as much as I like writing to y’all.