SO – we’re staring down an 8,000 mile road trip. We’re hitting the west coast and back. The long way. And even though 6 weeks isn’t that long by the standards of once-upon-a-time ilyAIMY roadtrips (11,000 miles in 11 weeks anyone?) it’s been a LONG time since we’ve been out for this long. Since Kristen joined the band I think our wanderings have tended closer to 3 weeks than 3 months and have been fewer and farther between than I’d like.
And so here we are. We’ve just entered Breezewood, PA and are moving along on route 30, keeping ourselves off the tollroads since we’ve got time and it’s a nice day. We’re on our way to Pittsburgh for the night, joining forces with our old friends Brad Yoder and Jason Rafalack – and for as long as we’ve known him, I feel like this will be the first opportunity we’ve ever had to really hang out for any length of time.
Paralleling I-70 makes me think of other parallels, and just as the car strains under the load of our 6 week pack, I feel like straining the metaphor to talk about how different traveling is now than from what it was when we first started.Heather and I just celebrated 11 years of wanderings and playing out across these United States. We’d started off with printed maps and an atlas, but thanks to a gift from our very, very first host – Shane Bair – shifted over to laptop-powered Streets and Trips pretty swiftly. A marvelous tool, but of course now we’ve got a GPS keeping us up-to-date on minute by minute traffic and only occasionally trying to route us through a mountain or into a stream. We’re still listening to Alice in Chains – but no longer an original CD – even though I’m sure it’s sitting on one of our phones or in the cloud, this is a burned copy from Ray Romain, the original having been stolen years and years ago in New York City.
We’re not driving a Saturn. We’re in a Hyundai that Heather purchased this year. Of course the matching blue guitars have gone by the wayside years and years ago as well, replaced by my CA and Heather’s Martin, but now we’ve added a djembe. A ukulele. A cello. A cellist. We still travel with a PA system, but it’s shrunk dramatically. Instead of printing and burning on the road, we leave the printers and CD burners at home and have that stuff all done in advance. iPhones didn’t exist. I didn’t drink. I didn’t drink coffee even.
How things have changed. I’m still with the same cellphone service (though it’s been bought and sold twice by now) and with the same health insurance provider (though my rates had trebled before the ACA cut it back in half again), gas prices have tripled as well… no wonder we don’t do this as much anymore.
I have a mailing address. That’s new.
I don’t know WHAT I did to deserve that… 
Rowan’s home and got to play the night with us before it was OUR turn to head out on the road. Rowan’s sticking around till his daughter is born and then HE’S off with the Carolina Chocolate Drops again – we’ll meet up in Saint Louis. Crazy to think when we see him next he’ll be a father! 
The approach and the result. With Chris Ehrich of the Honest Mistakes. 
Heather and I ENJOY wrapping cables!
Yahoo maps has DEFINITELY been replaced by google maps. I’m not dating the drummer. I’m dating the cellist. But the cellist has NOT replaced the drummer.
Speed cameras exist. Despite this, I’ve still never had a moving violation. Heather on the other hand, has been pulled over for doing 100+mph in a Saturn in West Texas. Needless to say that’s not physically possible. Also for driving in a parking space in West Virginia. Thank goodness she didn’t park in a driveway.
Heather’s got tattoos. She stood up. Both she and Kristen got strap-ons. Betwixt the three of us we have seven touch-screens, seven GPS-enabled devices, 9 hi-def video cameras and about 5 TB of drive space. As of today, we HAVE changed sleeping bags, and I’ve gone from fake nails to Alaska brass finger picks to Fred Kelly Freedom picks but we’ve got an ilyAIMY banner that Ray printed for us right at the very, very beginning… and I bought my black canvas backpack at the very, very beginning too. We have friends in every corner of the nation, but still don’t know anyone in Jackson, MS. Heather’s hair is still dark, mine is not.
Heather’s lost one thing. I’ve lost LOTS of stuff. I’m on my third eBow. But that’s not ENTIRELY my fault.
We don’t play Deep in the AM anymore. But we’ve probably played LooseN more than … more than anything. And I STILL Love that song.
There’s over 27,000 individual parts to ilyAIMY.com and 3,748 pages in the Journal.
Rowan’s married. Sharif’s married. Sharif has a kid. Rowan’s is due in a couple of weeks. I have a nephew. I lost my dad. I have a second nephew. We’re driving to meet him on this trip. A decade is a lot, lot, lot longer than you think.
