Tag Archives: pacific northwest

Day 3. Holy smokes, this was the longest, most action-packed, draining, and rewarding day on the tour so far.

It started off with me waking up before everyone else and making tea. And when I say “making tea”, I mean “almost burning down our host’s home”. Fortunately, Gabriel woke up and saw the smoke coming off the stove and saved the day. The tea was still lovely.

We packed the SUV to head up from San Francisco to go to Portland. It was an 11 hour drive, and we saw some beautiful rivers, lakes, mountains, volcanoes, etc. Luca made more room in the back so we didn’t have to hear him complain as much. However, the Italian football team tied with New Zealand (congrats to all my Kiwi friends, great match!) and was despondent for the next couple of hours. We’re sure Italy will come back in the next match for a win…

We arrived in Portland and hung out at the venue for a bit. They had a vending machine for musicians with guitar strings, drum sticks, guitar cables, etc etc. Super cool. They also had Galaga, pinball machines, and really great local folks. Some of the other folks playing that night were exceptionally weird and wonderful (including a performance piece about the first monkey in space from the perspective of the monkey). The venue (Slabtown) asked us to come back and play a residency there and considering how much we really like Portland it sounds very very tempting.

Totally exhausted from the drive and the show we rolled back to the motel. Gabriel and I pretended to be a gay couple and then sneaked Emma and Luca in after so we didn’t have to pay extra. Touring on the cheap is not for the faint of heart.

We’re getting much tighter as a band, playing our derriers off, and having a lot of fun, which is exactly why we’re here.

Tomorrow we have the day off from traveling so we’ll have some time to explore Portland before our show that night.

All the best,

SJ

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Day two, muolto successful. We had a great time with our host family and headed later in the day to San Francisco. SF is such a great city, we need to come back many, many, many times. The Brain Wash was a bar/diner/laundromat (in the back). Just like SF, the Brain Wash was totally eclectic.

Emma should never be allowed to parallel park, unless of course we have an extra 3 hours to kill.

The crowd at the Brain Wash was really fun, dancing, grooving, drunk, young, old, just cool. After the show we headed out and Gabriel ate a whole pizza by himself. We’ll be heading out to by some larger pants for him tomorrow.

Sorry I don’t have more pictures, we had some technical difficulties with our camera. But we’ll definitely take more tomorrow on our way to Portland, Oregon.

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Talk to you tomorrow!

SJ

PS. If you want to check out when/where we’re playing on this tour, go here: https://www.sjatr.com/shows

Day 1 of our first tour was pretty rad. Emma tetris-ed all the gear in to the SUV miraculously, leaving Luca smashed into his seat. He’s actually about four inches shorter now from being squished in the back for so long.

We arrived in Berkeley and immediately headed over to Rasputin’s Record Shop and Amoeba Records. I spent about 2 hours going through the $1 vinyl bins. Oh man, they had some super good stuff.

We got to the venue and met some of the locals, super cool folks. One of my favourites was John, a gentleman that looked like an older version of my brother, he even acted a bit like him. He’s one of those guys that’s at the bar every night, playing darts and generally holding the walls up. The show at the Starry Plough was brilliant. It was Paul McCartney’s birthday so we made sure that we rocked ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ for a bit. The crowd was awesome and they made us feel like we were home.

After milling about after the show meeting folks and signing CDs etc., we headed over to Emma’s Aunt’s house, our host family for the Bay Area shows. Her little daughters drew a super cute welcome sign and put it up on the door for us. They were all lovely and super cool. They had chickens and mice and a dog and hermit crabs and fish. We had eggs for breakfast the next day laid by their chickens, really cool.

We’re getting ready for our Day 2 show, will update more soon.

Wish us luck!

Best,

SJ

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