beautiful, funny, sad & true

June 29th was homecoming day. We slept at Breanna’s uncle and aunt’s house in Meridian, Idaho, but we had arrived so late the night before that everyone was either already in bed or pretty much comatose in front of the television. The morning was when we actually got to socialize.

Say hello to Breanna’s nephew and two nieces.

Kids kinda freak me out, especially when they’re either little, or if there are lots of ’em. Doesn’t matter how cute they are (and these kids are VERY cute), they still make me feel really anxious and weird. So I kinda kept to myself for a while, reading and then coming back in and out, or talking with Breanna’s uncle and aunt. Their house was great; it’s a shame we didn’t get any pictures of that too. Her uncle cooked Swedish pancakes and bacon and sliced some cantaloupe for breakfast, which was all completely amazing. They were very open and generous people, and I hope our paths cross again.

The drive back was beautiful and remote. Idaho and Eastern Oregon are sort of interchangeable in my mind. Every once in a while we’d pass a lovely ravine. . .

. . .or mountain (I THINK that’s Mount Hood). . .

. . .but for the most part, it looks like this.

The landscape went from greenish yellow to brownish yellow, and we went from the high desert down into the rolling hills. There are actually signs stating things like ‘now entering the Pacific Time Zone’ and ‘now crossing the 45th Parallel.’ We stopped to eat in Pendleton, at a great little 1950’s restaurant called the Main Street Diner. The way we found out about the diner was priceless. We stopped in at a convenience store to buy some water, and I asked the young guy behind the counter, “Is there a good cafe here in town?” The guy’s response was, “Uhhhh. . .for food?” Justin turned away and tried not to laugh.

After our lunch, ‘we continued on’ (Lewis and Clark’s phrase), and the temperature climbed and climbed all through eastern Oregon. I tried to take a picture of the thermometer when it read 108 degrees, but my camera’s battery was completely dead by then, so I wasn’t able to. By the time we thought to try with Breanna’s camera, the temperature had fallen to a mere 105.

The windows of the van were unpleasantly hot to the touch. We would roll them down if we wanted to take a a picture, but other than that, we kept the air conditioner turned on full blast that day. We passed what appeared to be a tree farm, in which all of the trees looked exactly the same, and were planted the exact same distance from each other, and were in plots of land that were perfectly square. On each side of those plots was normal Oregon desert. It was like, yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert. How’s that for a verbal visual aid?

Interesting.

Finally we got to the Columbia River, which is when we really started to feel like we were close to home. If you’ve ever lived in or spent much time in Portland or northern Oregon, then you know that the Columbia is the lifeline for this part of the world, and there’s something comforting about looking over and seeing that huge river beside you after you’ve been away from it for a while.

The last couple of hours we spent listening to Kathleen Edwards. If you haven’t heard her music before, you owe it to yourself. I now completely associate her music with road trips, because the first time I heard her was on last year’s trip to Nevada. Her songwriting is strong and catchy, and brutally honest. She’s really one to watch for. And her music is perfect for long, open roads.

True to form, it also started to get cloudy as we got nearer to the city, and by the time we pulled up to Breanna’s place, there was thunder and lightning, and big, threatening raindrops.

We took some end-of-the-trip pictures. . .

. . .and then I packed my stuff from the van into my own car and raced home before the rain really started. I just barely made it, too.

A trip is never really over until the rental car has been returned. This van served us so well, and was the perfect road trip vehicle. It was flawless, and quiet, and comfortable in all the heat, and it even got good gas mileage, even though it was pretty crammed full of people and their stuff.

Parting thoughts about the trip:

1) Justin and Breanna are amazing, and sweet, and talented, and genuine, and I’m very proud to call them my friends.

2) I can’t wait to hit the road again. This country has some breathtaking landscapes.

3) I want a better camera, dang it.

4) I need to work on my gangsta pouts and poses.

So that’s it. Trip’s over. Hope you enjoyed reading about it. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled witty and insightful blog, already in progress. . .

OneYearAgo

June 28th was a very eventful day. We got up incredibly early in the morning, checked out of the hotel, and hit the road. We had to get from Cedar City, Utah to Nampa, Idaho by 7:00, and it’s easily an eight- or nine-hour drive.

Since our travel route took us through Salt Lake City, I was excited at the prospect of seeing my friend of over twenty years, David Bible. We left a bit later than we planned, so for a while it looked like we wouldn’t have time to stop in and see him. I called him to break the bad news, and he called back a few minutes later with an offer we couldn’t refuse; if we stopped in at his restaurant, he’d have some food waiting for us.

We were very excited at this prospect, naturally, and I set the cruise control a bit faster to make up as much time as possible.

Remember how beautiful I said that Utah was? Well, Salt Lake City was certainly no exception. In fact, even in June, there was no shortage of snow-capped hills along the way.

We made really good time, and since it was Saturday, we didn’t have any traffic to deal with in SLC. We had plenty of time to stop in and see David, and I can’t even begin to express how glad I am that we were able to do that. Suffice it to say that not only was it amazing to see Dave again (it had been about three years), but I also got a new favorite café in the process. That restaurant is the Sego Lily Café in Bountiful, Utah.

Dave is the chef there, and the mastermind behind the majority of the creative and amazing cuisine, which I’ll discuss in a moment. For now, though, it’s time for a few pictures. Dave gave us a tour of the entire place, but we spent most of our time in the kitchen, talking and watching him work his magic.

I wish I could say that those fries lasted longer than they did, but I have to confess that after one bite, I knocked the precariously-balanced plate onto the floor, destroying the plate and rendering the precious fries inedible. Luckily, Dave had given us a box of them to take with us on the road, but even if he hadn’t, that one bite would have been all I needed in order to pronounce them the best fries I’ve ever had in my whole life. And the dipping sauce. . .oh my gawd. Forget ketchup, mayonnaise, or any lame combination of the two. Once you’ve had red pepper aioli to dip your fries into, there’s no going back. When Dave told me that on the phone, I said, “You didn’t just say ‘red pepper aioli’, did you, because if you did, I just got really excited.”

We stayed there for about twenty minutes (not NEARLY enough time), and then we had to get back on our way. Dave sent three different sandwiches with us, along with an amazing salad and a box of those incredible fries and aioli. We passed around halves of the sandwiches, each time proclaiming our current bite ‘the best.’ I talked with Dave today to get the full story on the sandwiches, and here’s what they were:

– grilled chicken panini, with pesto, provolone cheese, and tomatoes

– tarragon chicken salad, with onions, cashews, and a bunch of special ingredients

And then there was my personal favorite, which was Dave’s special, hand-made creation:

– merguez sausage (lamb and roasted red peppers), in a subtle and spicy red harisa (in Dave’s words, ‘a classic Tunisian condiment’) sauce, with cucumbers and onions. Absolutely unbelievable sandwich.

RIGHT NOW, I’D LIKE TO TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO TELL YOU THAT IF YOU LIVE ANYWHERE NEAR SALT LAKE CITY, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND EAT AT THE SEGO LILY CAFE.

SERIOUSLY. GO.

AND BRING ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS.

Thank you. Okay, so on with the trip. The landscape was consistently beautiful, but Salt Lake City gradually got more and more industrial (and less attractive) the further we got from the city itself. In a very uncharacteristic outburst, I raised two all-encompassing middle fingers to the city of Ogden, in which my blog stalker lives. From then on, the trip settled back into good conversation, and the landscape changed gradually from rocky cliffs to rolling, green hills covered with sagebrush, to amazing open spaces and skies.

Finally, we arrived at the site of the tour’s final show, the Flying M Coffee Garage in Nampa, Idaho. We unloaded our instruments, had some coffee, and took some pictures.

Justin took some pictures of Breanna, but neither of them realized that I was upstairs taking pictures of them at the same time.

Breanna has some family members who live in Idaho, and they were in attendance at this show. Breanna talked them into taking a few pictures of us. Here are the best ones.

This was our best show of the tour. We were excited, but relaxed, and although we were tired from the trip, I think we tried extra hard to make the show special, because it was the final one of the tour. For some reason the cello sounded particularly excellent. Every once in a while, I feel like I have a particularly good night, and this was definitely one of them.

After our two-hour show was over, we packed up our instruments and then stuck around drinking coffee, eating snacks, shopping for little gifts (the Flying M has an abundant supply of cool little gifts) and, of course, taking pictures.

Finally, at eleven o’clock at night, we packed up and drove back up the highway to Breanna’s uncle’s house in Meridian, where we completely crashed almost immediately upon our arrival. It was quite a day, but that means that now there’s only one more day left. . .ON TOUR.

OneYearAgo

Day Five was the shortest of our drives. Unfortunately, it was also the earliest show. We had a three-and-a-half-hour drive, and we had to be in Cedar City by 10:30 in the morning, so you can pretty much do the math on that. It was another crazy early morning. I was the first one up, at 5:45 again, so I took a shower and packed all up my stuff before anyone else was even awake. Then I took my camera out and went for a little walk to admire the scenery. I didn’t have to go far; just through Wendy’s orchard, actually.

When I returned, everyone else was up, and getting their stuff together to load up the van and head out. Wendy gave us huckleberry pie (or was it loganberry? Can’t quite remember. . .) and muffins, and then we raced off into the morning. We stopped at a truck stop along the way, where I saw two T-shirts that made me feel very disheartened with our society. They were marriage-related. One had stick-figure drawings of a smiling bride and a frowning groom above the caption, “Sentenced to life.” The other simply said, “All men are idiots, and I married their king.” Those made me really angry. I tried to imagine if I was married, and one day either my wife or I was wearing one of those shirts. Is the other person just supposed to laugh, or look away? I mean, if my theoretical wife wore a shirt that said, “my husband is the king of idiots”. . .well, actually, I don’t even need to finish that thought, because I’m NOT the king of idiots, and everyone who knows me (certainly anyone who’s likely to marry me) knows that very well.

Something else we found at this particular truck stop was hard-boiled eggs. We each bought a pack of two and devoured them, only to regret our decision about an hour later, when we all started to have stomach issues. We pulled over, ran inside, and absolutely destroyed the bathrooms at that next truck stop we arrived at. I hereby apologize to anyone who was in those bathrooms at the same time the three of us were.

But it wasn’t all eggs and poop. This was Utah, after all, so the scenery, even in the not-special areas, is breathtakingly beautiful. Breanna and I each took a lot of pictures just by rolling down the window of the van.

I’m sure there’s a way to get rid of those stupid power lines using Photoshop or something, but I don’t know how to do it, and the picture is pretty enough that I figured I’d include it nonetheless. Most of the pictures didn’t end up looking very good, but I managed to keep a few of my friends updated through pictures sent by text message also.

So finally we arrived in Cedar City, and we weren’t even very late. The sound crew had been working out some technical difficulties, so they were running a bit behind also. This bought us a little time to walk around, take pictures, get souvenirs, that sort of thing.

Each of the participating musicians got a T-shirt, but I splurged for a second one in a different color, and then I got a pin and a kazoo also. Breanna and Justin bought a frisbee, and a pin, and a nice little cloth bag. I walked around the grounds and talked for a while on the phone until Justin motioned for me that the group before us was almost done. We were the second group in the entire festival, so we watched the first group, tuned our instruments, and paced around the grassy backstage area.

Finally it was our turn. We were pretty nervous. We didn’t make any mistakes, but we just felt like mimes or something up there. There was one guy in the audience who kept yelling things to us. He wasn’t heckling us, but he was extremely drunk (incidentally, it was well before noon) and it was obnoxious. Luckily he liked us, or it could have been much worse. He clapped extremely slowly and out of time with the songs, on purpose. He also pointed at each of us in turn and yelled things like (to Breanna) “You have a really good voice!” and (to Justin) “Dude! You’re a really good guitar player!” and (to me, after I’d played a song on the melodica instead of the cello) “You’re good at. . .everything that. . .you do!” See what I mean? It was nice enough, but he still affected the flow of the show, and made us nervous.

So we finished our set and got off stage by about 1:30. We found the photographer guy who we’d been talking with earlier, and asked him to take a picture of us as soon as we put away our instruments.

It was really hot, and we were planning to be out and about for quite a while, so I wanted to go looking for a hat to protect myself from the sun. Breanna suggested that I wear her cowboy hat, which ended up looking really cool, so I wore it for the rest of the day, and actually got lots of compliments.

I know; I’m hot.

We were very relieved by the fact that we now had the rest of the day to ourselves. We went and checked into BestMotelInTheWest. There was an older couple checking in at the same time, who kept making jokes like, “Oh, we didn’t know that there would be live music in our room.” Ha ha. “Hey, that’s really great that we have musicians playing a free show just for us.” Ha ha. “Want to play us a song right here?” Ha ha.

After checking in, we went to our separate rooms and collapsed for a while. I unpacked my stuff and took a little mini-nap, and Justin and Breanna presumably did whatever young couples do when they’ve been cooped up in a van, or a house, or a studio apartment, for days on end, being constantly surrounded by at least one other person, then finally get some time to themselves. We met up afterwards, and walked over to get our complimentary meal at PizzaPlaceNamedAfterMafia. Naturally, our next plan was to find a bottle of wine or something for later.

That takes a bit of doing in Utah, where anything stronger than beer is controlled by the state, and has to be purchased at a liquor store. We were so sick of driving around in the van by this time that we were prepared to walk anywhere in Cedar City, no matter the distance or the heat. The nearest place was about a mile and a half away, and it was ninety-five degrees. Perfect.

Hey, look, it’s the Village People!

Nothing like a little shock value for the street full of locals driving by. But as you can see, I’m all about da ladeez. Howdy, ma’am. Much obliged.

So the three of us got what we wanted at the store, and then we walked the mile and a half back. We left our bounty in our respective motel rooms, and then went across the street to the festival to listen to some music and just check out The Scene a bit. We must have been there for a couple of hours, buying gifts, watching bands and getting more food, before we decided we were completely exhausted and done for the day. We headed back to the hotel, took some pictures. . .

. . .and then went our own ways. I can only imagine what those two ended up doing, but I talked on the phone with my friend again for about an hour and a half, and then watched cable TV shows, like Home Movies. The movie War Games also happened to be on, so I kept an eye on that while I wrote in my little notebook about the things I wanted to remember about the day. Things such as this; there are Gideon Bibles in just about every motel room in the country, but if you’re in a motel in Utah, you get a special bonus.

Hey, it’s a rock star’s life for me. Phone calls, Home Movies, War Games, the Book of Mormon. . .the debauchery just never ends.

Or DOES it? Find out for yourself in the next edition of. . .ON TOUR.

OneYearAgo

Thursday, June 26th was our longest day. We had a twelve-hour drive ahead of us, from Reno to a tiny town in Utah called Torrey.

I was the first one up, at 5:45 in the morning. I took a shower, got dressed, and then took some pictures of the hazy morning street scene of Reno. The haze is actually the smoke from the California wildfires. It didn’t clear up until we were well into Utah, by the way. Incidentally, all of these thumbnail pictures expand to full size if you click on them.

While I was packing up my suitcase, Kate woke up. We talked for a while, she in her makeshift bed in the windowsill and I on her papasan chair. I took pictures of the cats, and of her place, and out the window, and even some of her. The best ones were of her, waking up and snuggling with her cat Samantha.

From there, it was time for breakfast and various morning activities, which on that particular day meant more picture opportunities. Here we all are.

The water-drinking one actually has a little video too, as if by technology.

I would be remiss if I didn’t post a picture of Kate’s other cat, Secret. She and I became instant friends, and she actually slept on my sleeping bag for a while during the night.

Suddenly it was time to say our goodbyes, give hugs all around, and hit the road. The scenery in the rest of Nevada was uneventful. If you haven’t driven through it, it basically consists of many hours of rolling hills covered with sagebrush. There are only a couple of sections where it’s beautifully desolate in a good way, and the rest of the time it’s pretty much God-forsaken wasteland, broken up only by the occasional bit of run-down machinery or mining equipment, or even a power station out in the middle of nowhere. At one point there are even a couple of tunnels. Wowee! Breanna and I both took pictures of the tunnels, in fact. That’s how exciting it was. Nevada is a very strange place. Luckily, we had an especially deep (and private) conversation that day, with which to while away the hours.

Oh yeah, I just remembered. We stopped at the same rest area that Stephanie and I were so horrified by when she and I played in Elko last summer. This time was not nearly so eventful, but I should mention that each of the rest areas we stopped at in Nevada had neither soap nor running water, so we weren’t able wash to our hands. Pretty sexy, huh?

Incidentally, and apropos of nothing, the lasting inside joke from this day was when I told Justin, “I’m gonna punch your mouth right in the face.” That would have been the name of this entry, if I didn’t have the more plebeian title so firmly established already.

This trip, for all its amazing qualities, was not without tragedy. Justin realized at some point along the way that he had left his pillow behind in Reno. This was not just any pillow, either, but a super-special pillow that was bluish gray in color, weighed a ton, and was apparently the most comfortable pillow in the history of pillows. He was seriously distraught about it. I imagine that he’s gotten it back by now, because he offered to pay Kate a bunch of money to ship it overnight that same day.

Utah is as beautiful as Nevada is barren. Almost from the minute we crossed the state line, the landscape became more interesting. We drove through the Bonneville Salt Flats, which are gigantic, and a bit eerie too. We kept expecting the weather to be cold, because we were seeing what looked like snow on the ground everywhere. Very strange.

After that, the landscape became more green, the hills became more steep, and everything seemed more inviting somehow. In the immortal words of the Lewis and Clark journals, ‘we continued on.’

As we got closer and closer to our destination of Torrey, the landscape just kept getting more and more beautiful. The hills turned red, and the sun started getting lower and lower in the sky. The Picture of the Day Award definitely goes to Breanna for this lovely, cinematic shot. My pictures I had to touch up a bit with Photoshop, but this one is perfectly fine without any so-called enhancements.

We arrived at the venue and met Wendy, who was very sweet. She opened for us, and also took pictures for us during our set. At first we thought we’d play unplugged and unmic’ed, which ended up being too quiet, even for the smallish space we were playing in. So we mic’ed everything and played a normal show.

Can I just take a minute to say that while Reno was definitely the place I had the most fun, the gig in Torrey was by far my favorite venue we played. I mean, here’s this tiny little venue in the middle of nowhere, with these amazing red cliffs all around. And I’ve never seen as many stars as I did that night. We kept looking off into our surroundings the entire time. It’s a miracle that we didn’t play any wrong notes. Here’s what I’m talking about. Justin was singing, and Breanna and I were totally staring off into the distance. And yes, Justin and I did the same thing on Breanna’s songs too.

Between the cliffs and the stars, and the interesting people, we had a total blast. Afterwards, Wendy put us up at her place. We all stayed up for a little while, and then Justin and Breanna went to bed. Wendy and I stayed up talking, and she asked if I played with any other groups. I told her about the people I play with, and the various instruments that I play, and when I mentioned the accordion, she said, “Oh, really? I have two accordions. Maybe you could show me some things.” I agreed to do that, and we pulled them out. So after getting up at 5:45, driving twelve hours, and playing a gig, I stayed up until about 1:30 giving an impromptu accordion lesson. After a while, exhaustion got the better of me, and I had to give in and go to bed. The room I stayed in was very warm, so I opened the window and the blinds, which meant that I fell asleep staring at the huge canopy of bright stars, in which the band of the Milky Way Galaxy was clearly visible. That’s a nice way to fall asleep, by the way. I totally recommend it.

More to come in the next installment of. . .ON TOUR.

OneYearAgo

Day Three of the trip started with a surprise knock on the door around 7:00 a.m. from Breanna. “We gotta bounce. We have eleven minutes.” We thought we had plenty of time to sleep in and take our time, but Karlee’s parents were leaving, so that meant we had to leave too. I took a quick shower and packed my stuff in record time. We said our goodbyes and headed out to Country Kitchen for breakfast. After so much ice cream and stuff the night before, we were ready for some real food, which came in the form of eggs, biscuits, and potatoes in various forms. Good stuff.

As we were getting ready to leave, one of the other waitresses stopped to tell us, “You guys look like rock stars.” We all laughed and said, “Well, we’re musicians, actually, and we’re on tour from Portland. We’re on our way to Reno right now.” The waitress chatted with us for a second, wished us good luck on our trip, and then walked away, but we talked about it among ourselves for a while longer. Justin said, “I guess you look like what you do.” I replied, “Yeah, she didn’t say, ‘you guys look like bankers’ or anything else. She went straight for ‘rock stars.’ ” It was a funny and nice moment.

On our way out of town, we stopped at a Safeway gas station. This was the first time I’d ever seen a Safeway gas station, so I commented on that fact, and got out of the van to take a picture of it. Breanna and Justin both piped up, “Oh yeah, they have them all over. There’s even one in EasternPortlandSuburb,” so it suddenly lost its appeal as a novelty. Sure made for a good story, though, no?

Incidentally, there was a closed business that we drove by in Redding called Smart & Final. We all thought that was a strange name for a business of any kind, and we wondered what it was. I just now looked it up, and it appears to be sort of a grocery close-out warehouse.

So finally we headed out of town. The acrid smoke continued with us for the entire trip, as we had to drive through the mountains, where there were countless wildfires. Some were even burning along the side of the road, and we heard when we stopped at a little convenience store (where gas was five dollars per gallon!) that the Department of Transportation was considering closing the highway.

Our rental van had a GPS unit that we absolutely lived by. It could calculate our route for us, and then it would speak various commands when it was time to turn or whatever. Our favorite thing it said, if we got off course to go to a rest area or a gas station, was, “When possible, make a legal U-turn.”

In the late afternoon, we finally arrived in Sparks, Nevada.  The three of us split up and went our separate ways for a while. Justin and Breanna went to find a wi-fi hotspot, and I made a couple of phone calls. My brother and I talked about funny childhood memories, and somehow started talking about steampunk too. We thought it would be funny if I dressed in that Victorian style and wore a monocle and marketed myself as the Accordionist With The Monocle. I don’t know how that conversation started, but we were cracking each other up with that.

Across from our venue was the historic and cultural hub of the city of Sparks. There was the old train station, an old locomotive and cabin cars, an old schoolhouse (not in its original location), and a good-sized modern amphitheater right next to each other. Across the street were the modern library and the spruced-up old buildings, and that’s where we played.

We spent a bunch of time taking pictures and screwing around in the amphitheater.  It was really hard to choose which pictures to share, because there were so many good ones, but here are a few.

I started doing a stand-up comedy routine, telling a heightened version of one of the stories that I’d told in the van already, but telling it as if the audience was there, and ‘working the crowd’ and all that.   It was very funny.  Breanna took a million pictures of that.  Suddenly, it was time for us to head across the street to eat dinner and get set up for the gig.

We played with Kate and her band, and we were completely blown away by them. Kate’s songs were beautiful, and GuitaristEd and BassistGia were great as well. Here are some pictures from the show. There will be many more from this night in my upcoming ‘best pics of the tour’ blog entry. Again, it was hard to choose from so many great pictures, of both groups.

Afterwards, Kate put us up in her apartment.   This could be a whole gigantic entry by itself.   Kate was an extremely generous, friendly, and accommodating person, great in every way, and her apartment was absolutely stellar, located right on Reno’s main street.  Justin and Breanna were anxious to listen to the mixes of the songs for Justin’s upcoming CD, so they stayed in and listened on Kate’s computer while I went for a walk to take pictures.

Reno looks like a regular city during the day, but it completely comes alive at night. I walked around for over an hour, until well after midnight, and took almost three hundred pictures.   Here are some of my favorites.

When I returned, Bre and Justin were still sitting in front of the computer with the music cranked up, listening intently, and Kate was lying in the windowsill.

After they were done listening, Justin and Breanna turned off the computer and the lights and went to bed, and Kate and I sat in the dark and talked for an hour and a half. We talked about music, and what it’s like living and being a musician in our respective cities, and about life in general.  I also took a few more pictures. Here’s the view from her window.

This is the day I remember most fondly from the tour, and it’s days like this that make it so exciting to be a musician on the road.   I wish every day could be like this one was.  I feel incredibly lucky to have had even one day like it in my life, and this is only Day Three of the tour.

OneYearAgo