Tour Diary – Oshawa, ON (July 15th, 2012)

….and that’s all she wrote. 14,000 kilometers by bus, 5,000 kilometers by air, 23 performances, a few hundred empty casts, 1 squaw fish, 5 smallmouth bass, 1 Euro Cup, a handful of baseball games, dozens of really bad movies, many bottles of crappy beer, too many moldy hotel rooms, 33 days and nights and it all ends in Oshawa. This tour could have been a nightmare. When we signed on we had no idea whether we would be treated like second class citizens by the Mellencamp crew or whether anyone would be in the arena when we played or if anyone would even care that we were playing. The road miles and some of the individual drives looked insane and we know the toll that can take on a body and mind. We also had no idea if our music would work in these arenas and whether we would get the necessary buzz off of the performances to keep us nourished and interested. In the end we couldn’t have imagined a better outcome. The Mellencamp crew and band went above and beyond to help us out and to make us feel comfortable, rather than feeling relief that it was all over we felt a little pang of regret at saying goodbye to some new road-friends that we may never see again. The performances themselves were actually very fun, we are going to miss having all of that PA wattage to blast through on a nightly basis (Jared will definitely miss it). And we were pleasantly surprised at the attention that the audience gave us and their overall response. Sure, some of the drives reduced us to babbling fools, but we travelled through some beautiful country and driver Ron was about as good a driver as we have ever had and made the getting-there as easy as it could possibly be. One of the biggest bonuses of the tour was getting to some corners of our country that we have never been and experiencing this land’s beauty from coast to coast up close and personal. What can I say….we had fun.
 

Two weeks off and then back on the bus…that will be hard, but at least we are heading to one of our favourite parts of the country…New England here we come…again.