Tour Updates Part Two

Day Seven, The Maison and FOOD!:

Interesting fact. The bridge over lake Pontchartrian is the longest bridge over water in the entire world, and is located between New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana where we stayed, and measures about 23 miles across.

Anyways, after crossing the longest bridge in the world... we were back to the birthplace of jazz. Needless to say, we love it in New Orleans. Great city, hip people, AMAZING food, and even better music. We stopped into a small restaurant for lunch and had easily the best food of the entire trip. Granted they were competing with hot dogs and canned soup, but none the less it was incredible. After stuffing our guts, we went parked Suzy (the van) at The Maison where we were playing that night and walked around the town. Since it was Saint Patties day, we knew that there had to be something cool to see. But as always, we gravitated towards music shops and met the owner of Peaches, an awesome record shop near the end of the French Quarter. We talked to her for a good little bit, and got our CD in the store! Not only that but she agreed to play our stuff over the speakers for a while! Keep your fingers crossed, because she seemed to dig us, and she books bands on the board for the New Orleans Jazz Festival :) Needless to say, we are hoping to hear back from her...

But anyways, we went back to the Maison, played for a few hours, met some new fans, and had a great time. After we packed up for the night and were headed back to good ole Suzy, we caught ourselves. It was only 2 o'clock in a city that plays music ALL NIGHT LONG! So we thought better of the situation, and turned around and found the first club that had a live band. Much to our pleasure, a mostly instrumental gospel band without a name was jamming inside. We couldn't believe it when the saw the guitar player for T.I. take the stage and rip and absolutely unbelievable solo! After a little bit of star struck war off, we had to take off because at that point in the week, all four of us had come down with a sinus infection and major congestion and we all needed the sleep.

Back across the worlds longest bridge...

Day Eight- The Banks Street Bar

The triumphant return to The Banks! Well after a few games of pool, the keg ran out of our free beer :( But we had a blast seeing some old friends and played an early set before a face punching metal tour took the stage. We took the night off and hung out at the pool at the hotel and ate soup...

Day Nine- Up to Mobile

Back to the Hopjacks in Mobile, and some of the greatest pizza! After an incredible pie, we played for a few hours and saw some friends from the show earlier that week in Gulf Shores! After a far too brief chill sesh, we headed back to Big Lagoon to reclaim our camp spot in Pensacola. Tent up, beers down, lights out.

Day Ten- Last Show

For the first time all week, we bought an official bundle of fire wood. I say bundle, but for six dollars we got THIRTY logs delivered to our spot! So now we had a day and a half to burn off thirty logs... so we wasted no time cooking up some dogs and brats. After a satisfying meal we headed off to the other Hopjacks in Pensacola, and played a fun filled set. Little did we know the owner was sleeping upstairs and complaining about the noise all night long :) Sorry dude. That night at the camp grounds, we slept through an INTENSE rainstorm the likes of which hasn't been seen since Noah's Arc was commissioned.

Day Eleven- The Day of Damage

We awoke in the morning to our tent blowing over. Bummer. And everything outside was soaked. Blain and Matt slept in the van, so they were dry and happy. Brian and I on the other hand... not so much. But either way, we took it as an excuse to get an early start on the day and packed everything up. I went to the Winn-Dixie up the road to buy lighter fluid, because we surely weren't going to leave our six dollar wood pile unburned. After an ENTIRE bottle of lighter fluid, we had a roaring fire. We burned all remaining 25 pieces of wood down to nothing but ash in less than four hours, a feat no environmentalist would be proud of.

We packed up and hit the road headed towards Nashville to see our buddies from Tax Brandywine.... that's when the real shit show started. We were at mile 76 on 65 North (which is NOT very far from where we started) when Blain noticed the engine temp gauge had blasted all the way up as high as it would go! We quickly pulled over to find that we were leaking coolant profusely, and our fan belt had come off completely. Of course it was 5:30 on a Sunday. Not a mechanic in the miles (which in the backwoods area of Alabama, you really have to travel miles to find anything in the first place) was open or would answer the phone. We finally called the Advance Auto Parts out of desperation to see if they knew of anyone who could help us. We were told quickly to look up Greg Allen in the phone book. WHAT? Seriously? What the hell does that even mean? After a half hour of google searches and yellowpages.com, we couldn't find the elusive Greg Allen anywhere. Finally we called the auto parts store back and begged them to just tell us his number. He finally agreed. After we got ahold of Greg (who took about an hour to get to our spot from his home- which is actually making good time for the distance he traveled) and immediately told us we had blown out our water pump :( Wha wha wha... we had to pull up to a truck stop/gas station and camp out inside the van. Of course, this was the coldest night of the whole trip. But after a few left over beers, we all learned how to play Euchre again. That held us over for the rest of the night.

Final Day- Greg Allen

Greg came and picked us up and took us back to his hillbilly heaven in his back yard. With probably about 60 rusted out cars, and a small shelter, we really weren't sure if this was going to turn into a scene from Deliverance. But at the end of the day he ended up fixing us up and doing a hell of a job.

14 hour drive home.

The end.