I Love the gradual change inherent in car travel. You drive for hours, crossing state lines, you roll down the windows and the air smells different. You take a break and open the door and the temperature’s different. You get out and take a walk and the grass is different. You get back on the road and slowly the changes hit you. Today it was the slowly expanding presence of swamplands as we skit the Mississippi River, rolling south towards Jackson. And the sudden appearance of armadillos on the shoulders, legs up and bloated, slowly replacing possums and raccoons as the popular roadkill.
It’s our tenth day on the road, and now we’re five weeks from home, +/- about 13 hours and some time changes. Today’s bound to be brutal, though we’re still pretty chipper. The hot dry air of Nashville was a brutal reminder that we’d dipped south, and as we hurtle down I-55, the air’s getting moister and moister – it’s a pretty muggy 85 degrees, a far cry from how Indiana and Ohio had treated us with their cool, dry 60s and 70s. By the time we hit the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans we should be flirting with the 90s and George, my brother in Houston, threatens that we might break a hundred while we’re in Texas.
She eventually managed to get two of them in the drumcase at once. Highly questionable case of kitten napping.
All sorts of fruits and vegetables and food vendors. Hot coffee and hot coffee ladies, some sort of band setting up, and Christmas lights and Chinese lanterns being lit for the Pepper Festival that was going to kick off at around the same time we were going to be playing a house concert…. If only we’d known!
It seems absurd that we’ve also packed our winter coats, but only if you’ve never toured out west before. We’re probably going to get hit some pretty widely-varied extremes, and I’m sure I’ll eventually be glad I’ve packed gloves.
The sun’s going down on our right as we … sorry, my train of thought has totally been derailed by Heather’s rather less poetic sentiment of “I feel that’s some precarious ass truck stuff!” She apparently does NOT approve of how the gentleman we just passed has packed his pickup.
Last night we rolled into Nashville with enough time to kill to go check out the absolutely stunningly MASSIVE Farmer’s Market that Lives about a mile from our friends’ house – I think I recall Freddie and Whitney recommending that we check it out in the past and us never quite getting around to it. I’m really, really glad that we hit it this time – stall after stall after stall after stall of PUMPKINS ranging in size from as-big-as-Heather to able-to-HOUSE-Heather to maybe just the size of Heather. She’s, of course, the standard of measurement of pumpkins since her birthday is Halloween.
Close… Possibly the cheapest gas left in America. $2.79 a gallon. in somewhere’s Mississippi!
I’m glad we DIDN’T know, because we probably would’ve chosen to do something with the Pepper Festival instead of this absolutely wonderful house concert with Louise Mosrie – and the house concert was just Lovely. It could’ve been even BETTER, but I think we don’t (yet) have enough experience in running first-time house concerts, but with a couple of adjustments, the next couple of ones we’ve got on the calendar are going to be even better. Louise had a good time, WE had a good time – and most importantly, Freddie and Whitney has a great time and seem really enthusiastic about continuing to open their home to music – I think they’ll probably keep it low-key, but it’d be kind of awesome if we just witnessed the birth of a new house concert series!
An interesting note. I’ve often said that running my open mics (or running ilyAIMY) is like herding cats – and I think I can now finally speak definitively on the subject. Whitney and Freddie have recently acquired a new cat. They already had one cat. There’s an infamous story about him and barf. And they also acquired two kittens. Four cats, three of which having the unbridled energy of young felines, is a LOT of cats. And after loading in just one trip of ilyGear we quickly realized that ALL the cats were eyeing the door. Rather than trying to guard the door with all the ins-and-outs (both from our load-in and then with later house concert guests) it was decided to shove all the cats into an upstairs room.
The scene that followed, of Freddie sort of telling us “this is what needs to happen” and leaving it to Heather and Kristen and I to corral, capture and carry three squirming cats (Jack, the eldest, really was exempt from this undignified treatment) was pretty epic. Jonny and Cash and Christie did NOT come quietly and there was a lot of false starts, especially once we realized that we sort of had to have them all at the same time or one would come running out while the next one was shoved in. Eventually three cats were snagged, subdued and shuttled up a flight of stairs, shoved into the upstairs cat room, and left to their own devices for the next several hours.
We don’t know what those devices were, but there WERE occasional crashing noises from upstairs, not to mention many paws under the door when people passed by.
It was an event.
After we played the show, we got to release the beasts again and we spent most of the night playing with them, Heather even sacrificing herself to the sleeping area that couldn’t be cordoned off from them, probably getting less sleep that she’d like, but getting all the kitten time anyone could ever want. as I’m able.
