We're Not In South Dakota Anymore, Toto

We're up to day fourteen of thirty-three now. We've driven 2,424 miles and played nine gigs so far.  What a difference a day makes.  I’m sorry;  I’ve had this lifelong impulse to break into old song lyrics when the circumstances befit them.  It’s probably a disease afflicting those destined to be musicians.  We’ve made it all the way to our destination, Kansas City, after  the  longest leg in our travel days.  (And no, "We're goin' to Kansas City" isn't one of those old songs spinning though my mind; that one's a bit too obvious).

I always make these tour management decisions and then have to torment over the thorniest issues ahead.  It takes me back to previous travel days of varied marathon magnitudes as measures of our durability over these lo many years of touring.  The years of traveling in the far north included some 14-hour drives over mountainous ice and snow in Canada and Alaska.  The most recent object of worry to me was complicated not by weather but by all the congested vagaries and unpredictability of British roads, and was likewise considered by locals to be totally inadvisable.  But of course that never stops us.  We made  it in September from Glasgow to Southampton in one day, taking ten hours.  Steve drove that solo with me wimping out in the passenger seat, serving only to feed him sandwiches and keep him awake.  Today we did the fair thing, trading seats behind the wheel every two hours of the ten, allowing us perfect intervals to fill the gas tank.  As compared to jet-lagged British driving, it was a breeze.  In the vast untrammeled, open spaces of our wonderful interstate highways across the Great American Desert (that to me includes the Rocky Mountains), one can feel safe driving 85 miles an hour and that’s exactly what I did yesterday and today for six hours.  Please don’t accuse me of ethnocentricity in using that moniker, “the Great American Desert”.  It was once common nomenclature on maps of the United States and isn’t far from the truth though mighty changes were ahead with the coming of irrigation.

Weather is not small talk in this era of extreme changes.  So from a distance of travel I see reporting of it to be influenced by the money of demographics.   As you may know, we toured to Portland, Oregon five weeks ago and our arrival coincided with an overnight fall of a foot of snow.  It caused great and quietly polite, civilized disruption.  It didn’t cause national news that I know of.   Funny that a city roughly ten times the size of it’s namesake in Maine got no attention while that city, which can count on yearly pile-ups of snow, is part of all I hear about in my mid-western travels.  For that matter, all the repeated heavy blanketing of snow in these great Midwestern states haven’t made comparable national news to the East Coast “blizzards” of 2017 simply because, I believe, there aren’t enough people here to warrant much attention.  I’d say, in fact, any attention at all except from local news.  

Rapid City, South Dakota was a great pleasure to arrive to from Billings. We had driven by bright moonlight on newly dried roads to Billings after playing a booking in Bozeman.  The melting snow had turned side-roads and parking lots to treacherous black ice when the sun set in Montana.  The first two hours in the Rockies dogged us with flurries and then real stick-to-the-road snowfall for two hours.  Then it mercifully quit and hasn’t returned.  Skies today were blue and roads perfect.

 Wyoming inspired me last year to wax rhapsodic on the ugliness of it's abandoned trailer towns and fracking cylinders.  I take it back this year.  It looks much better with a coat of snow to outline it's lovely contours and to coat the aforementioned squalor.   And, to be fair, Steve reminded me that I-90 circumvents the most beautiful vistas in Wyoming.

Rapid City is now over seven hundred miles back in our history with sweet memories as gifts along with a paycheck yet to be deposited.   Our return to the Firehouse Winery went even better than last year’s performance though we missed Gen Obata’s contributions to our music. We had a respectable turnout of folks who were totally attentive as well as appreciative of our music. 

We’re not in South Dakota now, Toto.  It’s downright balmy here and time to break out the short sleeved shirts.  Kansas City has NO SNOW, HALLELUJAH!  I might add that every welcome of a comfortable bed feels heaven-sent in our long,wintry days of travel.  To quote Steve's song,"they're the angels of the road".  Kristi