Tour Journal page 3: tree houses and cops

8/1 Wednesday:

We woke up in the morning and said goodbye to everyone in Patrick's sister's house. Then we head out on the road for our first day of driving. We were headed to Davis, CA which should have been at longest a 2 hour drive. But, overall the trip took us about 7 hours because we stopped so many times to take photos.

We decided to drive up through the Napa and Sonoma Valleys because they are famous for wine and beautiful scenery. The first thing we noticed was this huge chair.

I don't know why it was there. But it was huge!

Around that time we were all starving, so we pulled into the first wine tasting spot we saw that said it also had food. But, we quickly found out that dinner there was $150! So we split before they could get us a table. With bellies moaning we thought we were going to all pass out before we could find any food we could afford. Finally a super nice local told us about an awesome market hidden in like a little neighborhood. We got some super delicious sandwiches there like this chicken salad one:


And, in the front there was a table of free fruit! So we stocked up a little for the rest of our ride. After we drove for about an hour more e found a beautiful lakeside spot to eat our "millions of peaches."


But, the ground was secretly super soggy like quicksand and Yoshimi lost one of flip-flops in it for a bit. But, we could finally recover after a little digging. The bad news for her was that her feet were crazy muddy and gross and there was no clean water around to clean them off, except... the big bottle of water we bought to drink from the market earlier. The only water they had in the super big size was Evian, which was almost as yuppie-ish as the wine tasting we were getting ready to try. So, there was no choice but to sacrifice our drinking water for her clean feet. We decided that cleaning your feet with evian is probably the least tour-like thing an indie band can do, so obviously we must be on level with like the Rolling Stones or something.

After that we drove on a little bit until we found a super beautiful lookout and pulled over:


There was a small secret path that led us to a super hidden bit of lake. The water was so warm and the lake was so beautiful that we had no choice but to strip down and jump in.

It was perfect!

After our swim we realized we were already running behind schedule so we headed quickly to Davis where we played an awesome awesome show at a place called the Delta of Venus. The crowd was so nice and responsive. We made tons of new friends! Thank you Davis and KDVS!

8/2 Thursday

We woke up early and started off on the long long drive to Eugene, Oregon. The "2 hour drive" from SF to Davis took us 8 hours because we stopped so much and swam and stuff, so I was really worried how long the "8 hour drive" to Eugene would take us. Actually though, we did it really quickly! That night we were playing our first house party ever, and when we got the directions there and they included "keeping driving on the street until it becomes a gravel road, and then it is a place that you can't see from the road" we knew it was going to be hype. But... we didn't know that it was going to be the best place ever!

Stonehenge (the name of the house that had the show) is too awesome to even explain! When we pulled in we noticed the super rad 3 story tree house in their yard, so we asked if we could go up there. And they were like "Yeah, I'll grab some beer and the dog. Let's go!" So we took some beer and their dog named Dave, and climbed up there and just relaxed.


Then they were like, "Do you want to see the bike car?" Who wouldn't want to see a bike car? I know you do!



They said they found it at a yard sale for just $2. Then they showed us some of their most extreme tricks. Like bike car off the slope, and two person bike car, and for the finale... two person bike car off the slope!

After that we had a big BBQ with so much good food


and then we went down to the basement to play. We couldn't run our computer sounds through the main PA , so we had to play it through a bass amp, which actually worked OK. The show was really fun. And, after us our friend Eric, a.k.a. DoublePlusGood played a super awesome dance party set that even involved some dancing dogs!



8/3 Friday

We woke up kind of late at Stonehenge

and in the afternoon everyone took us to some natural water slides, which I had never seen before in my life.

They were super fun, but they kind of bruised up our bottoms a little for the drive to Portland.

When we got to Portland, we felt totally strange and country. We had been hanging out in Eugene with no shirts or shoes and sliding in rivers, but we drove straight to the club in Portland where we were playing and it was really urban with techno music and a big sound system and special lights. We quickly re-acclimated though and played a really fun set and met a lot of nice people, our friends Kinya (Mumbleboy) and Kao helped play in our recorder orchestra too.


Then after the show, we were carrying our instruments back to our rent-a-car when we saw 25 police standing around it in the parking lot. We didn't have any clue what was going on... Did someone break into it? Was immigration here to take Yoshimi away?

So, we asked one of the guards about it and he replied, "Do you want to get mased? Take one more step and that is what will happen."
What!?
Then another cop ran up,
"Are you the white car, are you the white car?"
"Yes, sir." (being polite to avoid the mase)
"Come with me quick"

So he led us to our car. Some other cops had a coke-head looking woman pinned face down behind it. Apparently, she had just shot somebody, but our car was fine so they let us drive off. It was really really different than peaceful Eugene.

So we drove off to Kinya's house where we stayed. He had a really nice air mattress that we shared with Patrick.

Super tour mates!