We are pretty much still recovering from San Diego and Riverside today. It’s been a couple day’s worth of recovery. Where are we again? Oh yes – Medford and we are on our way home.

Kimo’s in San Francisco

TSR hold a special place in our hearts. Let us start there, and then go on to say that they are some of the coolest dudes to hang out with – extremely generous and a pretty damn good band to boot. We stayed with James at his palace in SF this time around (thanks, dude). We headed out with James and Lindsay after the show and drank at a local bar until they kicked us out. THEN, it was back to James’ place for some Jameson. We simply could not refuse delicious Irish Whiskey. Again, possibly not great decision making as we pretty much ensured that James wasn’t to work on time the next morning

We got up and hung out for a while down by the water and ponied up the van on the way to Medford…

Comin’ down the mountain

The mountains just south of Ashland & I have a sordid past. Let’s just leave the back story at that. Coming off of the mountain, we ran into a little bit of trouble. Damn that mountain pass… Turns out the front tire had lost about half of the PSI of air that it had when we left SF. Slow Leak. I don’t want to nerd out and get into details, (because there’s a lot of science involved), but basically, everytime we stepped on the brakes the van would start to shake violently. Not a good sign when you are coming down off of a mountain pass that is currently under construction.

Cooler heads did, in fact, prevail. We made it to Ashland and put some air in the tire and all was well. 5 more miles up the road: Johnny B’s in Medford

Johnny B’s

This place is kick ass. That’s all we can really say about it. They took really good care of us (Mary Ann let us crash on her floor). We didn’t get a lot of lead time to rally some troops out, but we will be back and will do a much better job.

After getting up in the morning, we hit up the local Les Schwab and got the leaky tire patched. Hooray! Les Schwab= the best tire place around. They fixed our non-Les Schwab tire for free! (just what a struggling punk band in Southern Oregon needs: something for free. Now it’s onward and upward (literally) to Portland… Ducket’s Pub will be a blast.

~ Dos

Well, we have rounded the bend on another fun filled trip. Let’s see… where were we last? Oh yes, Phoenix…

Tucson – shut down by Cops

Technically, we weren’t shut down by the cops. It was technically the Fire Marshall who shut us down. But that’s beside the point. The kids rallied and put us up in the Shithole. And a shithole it is – luckily it was a house built for punk shows. Tiny-ass living room, tinier kitchen… But what the hell, we aren’t here to make an omelet. We’re here to party and play. So we did. The kids there were amazing…

The party kind of broke up and we headed down the street to the house where we were going to crash and we kicked it at the neighborhood strip mall bar. We got to know the bartenders and ended up with free drinks all ’round.

Waffle House on the way out of town – which proved to not be as bad of a decision as we had all originally feared.

Sand Ee Aygo for Halloween

Let’s start by saying that large men should probably not wear green lycra body suits. Especially when said body suit makes it impossible to play your guitar. It worked out OK, and Chris almost ended up 100% nude, but luckily we were spared that sight. A trashy house wife and a crappy wizard costume helped us seal the deal.

Quite possibly the highlight of the entire trip: Save Amos. These guys are so incredibly tight. They just got their record picked up by Rdub Records… Keep an eye out for it and whenever they are playing a show – go see them. Very, very good

Party Marty

Holy $&@*. Save Amos was the highlight of the trip band-wise. The Managerie was the highlight of the trip show-wise. All of the kids in Marty’s crew were so fun and friendly to hang out with. Plus, Marty got us all completely hammered. Sheesh. I’m pretty sure we left with our dignity entact, but man – hanging out with Marty is not for the weak at heart (or spleen for that matter)

~ Dos