What can I say other than that I completely dropped the ball on keeping this up to date. I tend to procrastinate a bit when it comes to things, and that has left me well over a week behind on updating this tour diary. Now I'll take a shot at recapping the entire happenings up until this point. If I miss something, I will post a retraftion blog of some sorts....
The rest of day 8 - As I mentioned prior day 8 found us in Richmond, VA hoping to jump on a show with our good friends In The Red at Nara Sushi... as our luck would have it, they were able to squeeze us onto a bill that had 4 bands already... and gave us the closing slot of the evening. They fed us piles of sushi and cheap beers to kill the time prior to the start of the show. It was great getting to hang out with In The Red and compare road stories, as they had been out for a couple of weeks at that point. I would be completely lying if I said that this ended up being a good show... It ended up more like a private show with each band present and not hardly anyone else at all... the kind of show where you are able to personaly thank everyone for listening without the use of a mic inbetween songs. Regardless... it was still a chance to catch up with some friends and listen to some great music...
Day 9 - We spent the early part of the day driving from somewhere in Maryland where Monsieur le Montangne the driving machine managed to get us the night before to Brooklyn. This was a night off for us, so we managed to grab some dinner and drinks and hang out in Manhattan.
Day 10 - This was a fairly relaxing day considering we were now at our home base of sorts... Brooklyn where our bass player for this tour Ben lives. It's nice to grab a shower at a somewhat regular interval after you've been on the road for a couple days. We met up around 5 or so and headed out to the venue for the night which was The Championship Bar and Grill in Trenton, NJ. The show went alright, and we played for a somewhat small but attentive crowd. Allow me to back up for a second and describe Trenton for those of you who have never been there. In terms of comparison, we would say it is the equivalent of East Oakland in California... or any other run down ghetto that we've had the pleasure of making a wrong turn into. To give you an example... Eric was catching up with a friend from California on his cell outside prior to the show when a group of thugs proceeded to taunt him when walking by, acting as if they were going to hit him in a piss poor attempt to make him flinch. Now back to what went down. The highlight of the evening was me playing my favorite tour game of all which has been named by Eric "Nino gets Whitney Drunk". After the show I convinced Whitney to join me in a frosty beverage (something that he doesn't often do) and purchased him a Long Island Ice Tea. When he finished it I bought the second round... unbeknownst to me Whitney had been taking shots with Ben after each drink... so by 2 VERY stiff long islands, and 2 shots Whitney was on a good one, and my mission was accomplished. Some slurred words and gear loading later we were in the van and headed back towards Brooklyn... with a late night Wendys stop along the way. The best way to tell you about this next situation is like this (there's also video footage of this that may or may not go up here soon):
(The van is in the drive-thru of Wendys)
Whitney- "I don't feel so good guys" (Whitney opens sliding van door and throws up
Nino - "Let it all out bro, you'll feel better (Hands Whitney tissues)
Whitney - (wipes mouth..) "ugh.." (Whitney proceeds to projectile vomit for distance with what could only be desribed as a half gallon of liquids or so)
Ben - "Dude that's fuckin raw"
Eric - "Holy shit....wait this is the best part" (Eric who is holding the video camera pans from Whitney to the right until the camera is pointed at the drive through menu) "we're at Wendy's"
Ben - "Yay Wendy's!"
So there were a couple of other incidents somewhat similar to the aforementioned, but that was the best one... so I'll leave you with that.