A beautiful, snaky drive through the White Mountains….the two northern corners of this country are hard to beat for shear window gawking beauty. The persistent rain and the gathering mists only help to accentuate the intense beauty of this countryside.

It’s always a pleasure to play Vermont. The State might as well be Canada when you get right down to it…and I’m sure there are a lot of rightward leaning folks scattered throughout the other 49 that would be happy to host the succession party.

The gig tonight was at The Higher Ground which has had a couple locations over the years. This latest location is definitely its best. It’s a standard rectangular shaped rock club, but it’s clean, it has decent production with decent dressing rooms and lots of room to load gear. A good venue.

We had another sell out tonight and an excellent enthusiastic audience. As Jeff said, they were probably better than we deserved. We had an up and down night, with some very good moments and a few clunkers thrown in…the little bit of technical difficulties at the top of the set didn’t help.

We watched The Senators beat Buffalo in OT to move on to their first Stanley Cup finals birth……boo.

*****

We have played Northampton many, many, many, many times over the years and most of those times have been at The Iron Horse. It’s a venerable old folk club that could use a bit of investment in the sound-system and a little attention to detail in the dressing room. But it’s a comfortable place to play and this town is always a great place to visit. It’s actually quite amazing how much live music this area supports, between the Iron Horse, The Calvin Theater, Pearl Street, and The Pines Amphitheater, one could check out a national touring act on most nights of the week. This is graduation weekend at Smith College. Another class of female smarty-pants heading off in to the world to hopefully make it a better place…the best of luck to you all…we could all use a better place.

Two shows tonight to cap off this run: a hard way to end a string of dates, with the gas tank on empty. But we dug a little deeper and I think we had the best night of the leg. An excellent audience that whooped and hollered in all the right places, a very satisfying way to end.

See you in a couple of weeks.