Built on Paper, Laced with Gold
So here I sit in a Travel Lodge hotel room in Toronto. We’ve been in the van for 5 days straight, but luckily no one killed anyone. First night we only made it 9 hours to Banff and ended up staying there with my friend Edo who is at the Banff School of Arts doing a residency program with his band Brasstronaut. We got into way too much beer and whiskey and spent the night at the empty campus pub playing pool and inside their music hut which was like a log cabin surrounded by subzero temperatures, tree and snow… yet somehow with a drum set, PA, gear, and a grand piano.
Anyway I stayed up till 6 am or so having a huge fire with Edo and getting into some Crown Royal that someone left in the communal fridge till we were loading up more wood then should ever be inside a house.
The next day we needed to make up for lost time, and since the roads seemed really good we pulled an overnighter long haul, leaving Banff at 10 am on Monday and arriving in Marathon, Ontario at 5 pm Tuesday… 30 hours later! It was boring at times so I took to writing some songs for a lark on my laptop hooked up to the stereo.
Tuesday morning we had a brief stop in Thunder Bay to fix a leak in the tire that was causing the van to sway perilously on the road back and forth, but nobody knew what was wrong cause we just assumed we were all driving bad from being shit tired. A cop even pulled us over to make sure we weren’t drunk, but I swear it was just the tire which was really flat.
Oh, great recommendation: THE THUNDER BAY RESTAURANT cause the woman gave us shit and told us to get our own coffee and pick up our food from the kitchen, but it was all in good fun and she swore like a sailor and we all laughed and then she hugged us goodbye. I’ve never had to scoop my own eggs off the grill before but it was hilarious.
Marathon, Ontario was where we finished our long haul. We were set up with a bunch of beers in a sweet motel room with a board game. They also let you smoke indoors which is a rarity these days but made Dana, our drummer, pretty excited. Somehow, by the end of the night, we were folding Joseph up into the hideabed and laughing at each others stupidity.
The next few days were uneventful.. just driving another 15 hours to Toronto. We stayed at a lumberjack motel the last night and sorted out all our merch for tour, but thats really boring. Anyway the tour really starts tomorrow in Montreal, so I guess we’ll have to see how it goes from here.