Road trippin'

Last weekend (if you start the weekend on Thursday, which we will for this post), we had three gigs in a 48-hour period, which is a lot of gigging. What's most interesting, though, is that one of those gigs was 5 1/2 hours away. Yup - that's 5 1/2 hours each way. Road trip!

We actually decided earlier this year that we were going to be judicious about our long-distance gigs. We'd done a couple of trips to Nashville with marginal success (okay, one marginal success and one total disaster), and one trip to El Paso, which was almost a bust except that Johnny worked something out with the booker to make the trip at least a break-even (the event we'd been hired to play had been double-booked, and they almost sent us away without playing and with less money than our expenses to get there - it's 9 hours away).

We learned some lessons in those experiences about what kind of guarantees to get, and what to get in writing, if we were hired to play a gig outside of our usual Central Texas area. But as a general rule, we just don't like to book anything more than a few hours away. In this case, though, the money was good, we could go up and back in a day, which keeps our expenses down, and the people we dealt with were professional and put the things we needed in writing. So, last Thursday, off we went to play the Big Apple Deli in the bustling West Texas metropolis of Snyder, Texas!

The first part of the trip was nice - good weather and some pretty scenery. I had one hiccup, in that I was supposed to sit in on a conference call for work during the drive, and wouldn't you know that literally five minutes into the call, I lost service? Over the course of the next hour and 15 minutes, I constantly kept trying to call back in, sometimes getting through for a few seconds and other times just being shut down completely. I had one stretch of about 15 or 20 minutes, when we got to a town, that I had service. I called in, took furious notes and tried to glean as much as I could before we got out of range from that town.

Finally, we got to an area where service was back, and stayed back for the rest of the trip. I called back in to the conference call immediately, just in time to hear everyone wrapping up. For real, Verizon? The only stretch of road for our entire trip that I didn't have service was the precise stretch of road that I needed it?

That fail aside, the rest of the trip was fine. We got to see some pretty interesting things along the way, such as this bad boy:

It looks like a rocket booster, but we couldn't think of a reason why a rocket booster would be traveling along a West Texas highway, so maybe it's just something industrial. But a rocket booster sounds way cooler than some kind of factory chimney or something, so let's say that we drove behind a rocket for a while.

Another sight that never fails to awe me - fields peppered with huge wind turbines, stretching as far as the eye can see:

I'm not sure that photo really does the sight justice, but it gives you an idea. And in case you don't really get a sense of how big these things are, here's a closer shot with a train and an 18-wheeler in the frame for reference:

As a proponent of alternative fuels, I just love seeing these giants out there cranking out the wind power! A less cool sight greeted us when we got close to Snyder, though, when we saw this on the horizon:

Not the sky we wanted to see for an outdoor gig. Luckily, the venue had an indoor stage, so we just set up there for the gig. We had Joe use his kitbox instead of his full drumset, because the acoustics inside the restaurant were very echoey, and we were pretty sure that no one would tip us if we deafened them. The kitbox worked like a charm, and we had several folks who listened attentively, sang along, gave us thumbs up and put tips in our jar. That's all you can really ask for.

The drive home proved to be a little scary. We drove right past two pretty horrific accidents, no doubt caused by the rain. I didn't get photos since we came up on them quickly and didn't slow down to rubberneck. But the accidents left me pretty paranoid for the rest of the drive home. Paranoid is no way to travel, people.

We did see one cool thing, though - the wind turbine fields at night. Each turbine has a red light on it that flashes to alert planes that they're there. Entire fields all flash together, and there are no streetlights out there on the lonely highway, so one second, the expanse out your window is pitch black:

Then the next second, hundreds of red lights hover in the dark:

Again, the second photo doesn't do justice to the eerie feeling of a whole horizon of red lights appearing in unison, followed by another chorus of lights, one field over, a beat later, then total blackness again. It probably freaks the aliens out, which I think must be a good thing.

The Snyder experience reminded me that while road trips can be a bit of a risk financially if the gig doesn't go as planned, they have their own allure. If you can meet some nice people and see some cool stuff along the way, sometimes the ride is worth more than the gig.