adrienne's Tour Diary

Susan and Jake's apartment is so nice'it's great not to be in a motel or sleeping in the van. Wheatie, their cat, is very hospitable and chatty. The train goes by right outside, which is pretty cool. We were awake until about 3:30 a.m., or I was awake until then. I haven't slept as soundly as I did last night since I was about 3. We're about to head to Ohio, though it's very nice here!
We loaded everything out of Susan's apartment building via the elevators, but we stalled an elevator with all the weight and the doorman came upstairs to see what was going on. Turns out he's really into the rock, so he was very helpful, used his special key to keep the elevators in one place while we loaded/unloaded them. But as we put everything into the van outside we realized that Dan's pedal board, with 6 pedals, was not with us anymore. We drove to the club and looked around but it was gone. I called my brother and he looked up addresses for guitar shops online and Dan and Chris W. went to the Musician's Exchange while Chris G. and I ate sandwiches in the van. The Musician's Exchange only had a broken Memory Man, so we all went to what seemed like a brand new Guitar Center in Chicago, with free parking, as is stated when they answer the phone there and the parking message is also illustrated on the employee's shirts. While Dan picked out what pedals he and Soren could figure out would work to make his guitar sound like he wanted it to, Chris G. convinced Chris W. to get a hard shelled drum hardware case, which has been a long time coming. In the meantime, we're trying to track down the other 4 bands we played with in Chicago to see if one of them mistook Dan's pedal board as their own. We got on the road a lot later than planned, around 5 p.m., and we were due in Dayton at 8, over 300 miles away. It started to pour rain. There was a sign for Dayton on a freeway we couldn't find on the map. We took that exit. It landed us directly in Dayton, Indiana. We got gas there and got back on the highway that's on the map. We watched Romancing the Stone on DVD on Chris's computer. I called Melissa at the club and was happy to hear that the show wasn't going to start until 10 and we'd be 2nd or 3rd, so we were in the clear. When we got to Dayton we had a hard time finding Elbos, as it's under a lot of concrete, a strange parking structure. We looped the van around in the downtown area and then a green Volkswagen Bug pulled up alongside us and a woman smiled and said through the window, "Are you Citizens Here and Abroad?" It was Amanda, Dave, the singer of In the Arms of Sleep's girlfriend, and she had noticed our California plates. We followed her to the club and the first band, Geography, hadn't even started yet so everything worked out. In the men's room someone had drawn on the poster for our shows, on Dan's face, adding facial hair or something. I only heard about it, since I didn't go into the men's room. After the show we went to Denny's and ate breakfast at 2 a.m. The Denny's we went to has the same floor plan as the one my grandpa owns in Fresno but there was a remarkable difference: there are ashtrays in the bathroom stalls. Plus, everyone seemed to be staring at us, which was a little unnerving, until two serious goths came into Denny's and they distracted the eyeballs away from us. Amanda played the toy pickup game after we ate and then led us to Dave's parents' house in a neighborhood with the biggest lawns I've ever seen. There were two rooms for us and, as Dave had alerted us at Denny's, there was a lot of food in the kitchen, even though he and his siblings have moved out. We only had time to sleep for about 3.5 hours before waking up at 7 a.m. and packing up the car to head to NYC. Dave gave us a ziplock bag of muffins and some Chex Mix from his parents' kitchen. It turned out that one of the guys in Geography or one of their wives or something is somehow related to Dave, as Dan saw photographs of this man in Dave's parents' house and had seen this man at the show the night before. There was a really nice scotty dog this morning who insisted on being petted and two cats. We hit the road at 8 a.m. and are now driving through Pennsylvania, just stopped at a Starbucks attached to a Bob's Big Boy. Chris W. and I were alarmed about 2 hours ago when we saw a sign that read, "Welcome to West Virginia" but Chris G. and Dan assured us that we were going the right way. I can't find my hair clips.