10 hours down. (Des Moines, Iowa)

Hello from Des Moines… we’re just pulling into the city from 10 hours driving on I-80. I actually wrote a nice long Road Journal post way back in Lincoln, Nebraska, and when I hit “publish,” it erased the entire thing… so we’re not entirely slackers here, just had some bad technical luck.

We’ve had great luck with the weather today… clear skies and 70’s the whole way. All of the band members took shifts, with Jay driving right now and me (Russ) in the passenger seat updating the Backstage and calling out directions from Google Maps.

Fred’s been taking photos along the way… check ’em out below. Some highlights from the trip so far… stopping at a creepy gas station on a dirt road and noticing two gravemarker-esque wooden crosses behind the building (pic below)… stopping at a “food court” (not sure you can call it that) near Lincoln, NE and trying to tell the woman behind the counter that I don’t want french fries as a side with my spaghetti and meatballs (she thought I was crazy to say ‘no thanks’)… Beers playing with toy animals somewhere in western Nebraska… a “live show rabbits” sticker on a van we passed… and our favorite sign on I-80, the “outlaw sodomy!” sign painted in white paint on a black tire hanging on a ranch fence in middle-Nebraska. We see that one on every tour, it really jumps out awkwardly from the countryside.

More updates later… we’re about to exit and find the venue… pics for now:

packed up and ready to go (from colorado)

uhh… let’s just use the bathroom and get out of here

live show rabbits!

this is a lot of what we saw for 10 hours today

the boys – laptops and mp3 players

jay and anton solving the world’s problems

red van, white trailer

our power supply for laptops, chargers, etc.

beers sane

the big archway in nebraska… some day we’ll stop at it

beers insane (those are little animals)

your photographer/roadie/friend/dj… fred.