Once upon a time, Heather was walking down the streets of NYC when she came upon a woman in rags who had just dropped her change all over the sidewalk. So naturally, Heather, being such a kind person, began to help the lady pick it all up. Upon completion of the change-retrieval mission, the old lady grabbed Heathers arm and gazed intensely into her eyes.
"Do not.... I repeat... do NOT blog of your experiences on the road for just under a month!" she said in a classic croaky old woman voice.
"Why not old lady in rags?" Heather replied.
"JUST beEEEeeccaauUUUsseeeEE!"
"Ummm, ok old lady in rags"
At which point the old lady VANISHED from sight, leaving Heather with nothing but a shiny 2009 quarter and the fateful warning echoing in her head. So it was decided that blogging should be temporarily suspended and was ne'er spoken about again, until now...
OLD LADY IF YOU'RE OUT THERE, IT'S BEEN JUST UNDER A MONTH SO WE'RE IN THE CLEAR, RIGHT?
We'll take her silence as a yes.
So hi everyone! Thanks for your patience, we know it's been a while...
We just got done with a itty bitty baby tour to Cleveland, Evanston and the back country roads of Iowa. It was interesting to say the least.
Our night in Cleveland was wonderful and strange. We were a bit (read: a lot) overshadowed by the amazing Cavaliers game that was going on, literally, around the corner (we were mere paces from the arena) and on the big TV behind the bar.
As we were playing, the room would erupt into unbridled cheers at random moments and at first we thought, "Hey this is great....they REALLY like us!" However, upon further reflection we realized it might have been Lebron's sweet moves, and not our life-altering songwriting, that had our audience on the edge of their seats. I suppose we'll never know for sure - we'd like to think our music can compete with a half-court-nothing-but-net-shot-at-the-buzzer, but we are definitely bias.Evanston is not Chicago, but it's still awesome and we had a great time there. We played at a place called "Space" (not to be confused with "The Space" in Connecticut), and it was a helluva good time. The room was beautiful, the sound was phenomenal, the crowd was jovial and the hospitality was some of the best we've come across - they fed us homemade organic pizza for goodness sake, I mean what else is there in the world? An all around terrific time.
The final show of our tour took place in a barn. Literally. We were one of four acts playing the 3rd annual 'Farmer Songfest' festival in Ellston, IA, a town which, for the life of us, we could not find on our road map - our GPS ("Ruth") was equally perplexed in finding the festival but we got there, by golly! Upon arrival, we were greeted by two dozen or so friendly Iowans who were all pitching in to set up the festival tents, 8 dogs that couldn't have been muddier, and 45 million june bugs. By the end of the night there were close to 400 people, 15 dogs and 100 million june bugs - the latter were particularly enthusiastic about our music, which they expressed by flying full-speed into our faces and instruments throughout the show. We spent the better part of our hour-long set trapping the enthusiastic little fellas and throwing them back out into the fields. They seemed to show a particular affinity for Heather, which she tried her best to reciprocate but there was something about the whole exoskeleton thing that she just couldn't get over.
After the Iowa show, all we had to do was drive the 20+ hours back east. Easy! We decided to treat ourselves to a happy little detour at the halfway point to split up the journey, so we spent Memorial Day at Heather's grandparent's Day Camp outside Ann Arbor, Michigan. We enjoyed a relaxing day of boating, fishing, arts and crafts, nature walks, swimming, camp crushes, BBQ and archery. Observe:
As you can probably tell, we had no fun at all.
All the love from this vehical to you we do send...
~The Lead Sled.
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