The end of the tour!

Hey dudes and dudets,

So, what a time we have all had in the last few weeks. . .what a time. The south potion of the tour went VERY well, we got a lot of people on our mailing list, sold a ton of merch, had successful shows pretty much the entire time, and had no car/trailor problems. . .the second half. . .well, let me go ahead and recap. . .

So we start of with a fun show in Cincinatti, OH where we play well, but, I am suffering from food poisoning, but my motto is everything that starts of bad, ends up good, so I was in decent spirits. At the end of our first show, some asshole from the band after us yells at us to hurry and get our stuff off of the stage, so his band can get on stage and proceed to do awful punk versions of 2-Pac songs, sorry guys, I bet the audience just couldn't wait to hear 2-Pac die again! Poor guy was probably rolling over in his grave, but maybe I'm being harsh, they obviously have a reason to rebel, God made them idiots, so they will show the world with their Hip Hop Punk just how angry they are at their short commings!! Take THAT society!

Anyway, next we head to Rochester, NY where we have a really fun acoustic set and get a great place to stay complements of Andy's friend Jen, THANKS JEN!! :-) We also meet up with Mike Lombardo, get some good chicken wings, have some laughs, and so on. It was a good night, things were going well so far. . .then we get to New Jersey.

The Wyndham Hotel in Newark, New Jersey is where the shit goes down. If you're ever in town, do yourself a favor and choose another hotel, the people here have no trouble charging you full for your room after you lose thousands of dollars worth of equipment and have your trailer and Van Vandalized, thanks for the stay guys! (On a side note, I am pretty sure Satan was born in Newark, like 95% sure.) So at this point, we are still able to pull ourselves together and play 2 successful nights at Kenny's Castaways, which is a great club, read the preceeding blog to get a full rundown on the events of those nights, the first night was not one of MY better nights, but Matt and Brian met John Popper from Blues Traveler, so that was cool. . .I just ended stumbling through a couple covers I didn't know with the band that played after us. HA! It was hilarious, but also pretty embarassing I must admit.

Next show in Lewiston, NY gets cancelled because we have to deal with the incompetent staff at the Wyndham and try to squeeze some amount of compensation out of them since their "security" (I say that lightly) staff screwed up and didn't happen to see people carrying away tons of equipment from our van, BANG UP JOB ASSHOLES! :-) So, we spend that day driving to Alfred where we are treated to a great dinner, and amazing hotel accomodtions courtesy of our good friends Mike and Michelle Green, the owners of The Hott Spot! Which is a new tanning salon in Alfred that is pretty cool actually, I don't frequent tanning salons, but, it seems like a cool place. The show wass awesome and hilarious at the same time, we had an outside show with a dance floor of sorts right in front of the stage where a bunch of painfully underage kids, and adults were getting drunk off their asses and dancing and giving us more entertainment then we were giving them! Oh what a show, we got rid of a bunch of merch, met a lot of cool people, and. . .in all honesty it ended up being the only redeeming night of the entire second half of the tour.

Flash forward to Cleveland Ohio, later on the next day. Andy and Matt have been complaining that they have to pee for nearly 2 hours, so, even though we have plenty of gass to drive a hundrerd more miles or so, we stop. During refilling the tank, Abe just happens to walk back to the trailor and to all of our dismay looks down and sees that the A-beam of the trailor has rusted through and snapped, literally about 50 miles more and we would have caused a pile up due to our trailor flying loose from the back of the van. . .so thank god andy and matt almost pissed their pants, or we very well may have been dead and that would have just topped off the second half of this tour. Thanks to Andy's dad for making the 4 hour drive to come help us bring our equipment back home, and oh did it ever suck, but we had our revenge on Traylurch anyway!

We DESTROYED that thing, with the condition it was in, there was no way we were going to be able to get it home, so we decided abandoning it was the best course of action, but not only did we abandon it, we took 2x4's to it and destroyed the walls of it, and Abe, Brian, Konner and i all covered it in Urine and threw the bearing grease all over it, sorry to whoever's gas station we left this thing at, but uhhhhhh, yea, at that point we had to destroy something, and you were just unfortunate enough to have our trailor break down when we stopped at your station, Hope you guys can end up getting more use out of that piece of crap then we did at least!! Bye bye Traylurch, you were a horrid trailor and we won't miss you.

So what do we learn from this friends, never leave your gear alone in Newark, Never expect hotels to have souls, and if you have a problem, (Like a broken Trailor), piss all over it and leave it for the good folks in Cleveland, OH to deal with! At least we still have a show today in Nashville, that should raise our spirits. HA! Ohwell, live and learn right? We can only hope next time we are a bit more prepared.

~Peace, Love, and Good Vibrations~

Blain