Hello from Western Iowa.

Hi, All,

We’re in the van on I-80 in western Iowa, on the long road home (we fondly refer to this part of I-80 as our “long driveway”). Had a really fun show last night in Des Moines at the 4th Street Theatre. The acoustics in that room are fantastic, and we ran our own sound, which we’ve got dialed pretty tightly from the tour, so we were really able to enjoy the playing. Here’s how the setlist panned out:

Let It Be (Anton solo) –>
Park
Hazel
Sister, Brother
IIOKYN
View From Way Up Here
Obey –>
Life During Wartime
Don
Turn My Egg

All in all a great last night of the tour. There was some confusion when we arrived at the venue, as they had accidentally double-booked the room with another event, so we had to scramble to get set up quickly and then play… but we – and the audience – made the best of it. These are the funny things we have to deal with at our level, and they usually end up working out.

Mario and I (Russ) walked over to a Perkins restaurant next to our hotel late last night and enjoyed some French toast and chocolate pie. Beers and Anton responsibly skipped that and went straight to bed. We used Priceline.com to get the hotel about an hour before we got to town and scored a great rate ($120) for two big suites. Mario recommended Priceline from past experience with other tours; we’ve always booked our hotels in advance, but figured we’d try it out on his suggestion, and it worked out great.

We’ve had amazingly nice driving weather the entire tour, but we’re paying for it today! It’s raining ridiculously hard, there’s a good amount of traffic, and visibility is pretty bad/foggy. Anton is driving, which is great, as he’s owned the van for 10+ years and knows how it handles… it looks like we’re under this band of bad weather the entire way to Denver, including snow on the final stretch (3-4 hours) in Colorado. Yay – a little bit of excitement peppered into the trip here on the last day.

We’ve got a bunch of photos here that we’re going to have to go back and add throughout the posts, just have to get them organized and resized, etc. Check back to see the Road Journal with more photos from the trip.