From our "Games for the Road" fun packet from Anna (love her):



NEW STATE MOTTOS:
PA: Chris McCoy & the Gospel & Mike & The Mechanics
NJ: Who wants to fucking know?
NY: Welcome to the Bronx, now get the fuck out.
CT: Come drive through us.
CT: SKULL HAWK.
RI: Home of the world's saddest flea market
RI: Too little to be big, too little to be good.
NJ: If this place ain't open, I'm walkin' to Wawa.
RI: Did I say that last night?
RI: First I lick it, then I stick it.
PA: Search for the Wet Spot.
PA: You can spend "Jess Time" with me!
MD: Thow Carter in the bog.
MD: So horny, I could fuck a chair.
MD: Like Beer?
MD: Adam's dad lives here.
WV: 2 birds, 1 turd.
WV: Did I hear "hot dog hole?"
WV: Where Kip's in charge.

Wednesday 7/25/07 - Columbus, OH - Carabar w/ Richard Buckner & Six Parts Seven

Had a great show, was awesome to kick off the tour there with friends and in our favorite bar. We left Carabar drunk, happy and with high spirits at about 2am and headed towards Philadelphia since we had an early gig there the next day and 9 hours of travel time ahead of us. 35 miles outside of Columbus the van starts overheating, we have to pull over and the radiator is spewing orange fluid and gurgling like mad. We sit at a gas station letting it cool down for 2 hours, trying to decide what to do, hoping it doesn't mean we have to cancel our first show and turn back, feeling defeated so soon. It seems everyone in that part of Ohio has neck tattoos. The gas station attendant tells us the orange stuff is rust and he wasn't very helpful. I think we
watched a few meth deals go down in the parking lot too. We try to nod off, waiting for the AAA guy who says he'll be there in 40 minutes, he arrives approx 5am and asks, "whatchoo want me to do?" and he's pissed we have a trailer and he can't tow us. he thankfully takes pity on us, takes a look at the van, tells us we can fill up with water and that should get us down the road another hour or so until we can find a garage, he thinks we need a new water pump. We get that all taken care of and get back on the road and find the van is handling OK for awhile...

Thursday 7/26/07 - Philly, PA - The Tritone Bar



Approx 7:30am, just across the PA border, the van starts overheating again and we pull into the tiny town of Wolfdale, PA near Washington and find an Auto Body Shop who can/will repair the water pump. It takes til 11am and costs $250 we don't have. Chris eats hot beef, calls it perhaps the biggest mistake he's ever made. There is no cheese in the town apparently. None of us have slept for like 30 hours at this point, we are hungry, hungover and sharing a wood-panelled waiting room with The Today Show and some local couple waiting on their car, who I believe only communicated to each other in curse words.

Waiting for the waterpump:


Wags colored this while waiting:


Get to Philly just in time for our show, get free dinner and drinks. Mark's family & friends show up thankfully. A regular lights his hair on fire while we are playing and stinks up the joint. A crazy woman comes in and asks to play and Chris has to shoo her off stage. We leave right after, Mark drives us through the historical downtown parts of Philly on our way out and we head towards NYC to find a place to crash. We end up at The Lodge Motel just outside of Trenton, NJ. There is blue shag carpet and stains on the curtains. At this point, we've been up for 40+ hours. Jess & Chris pass out after a few beers. Mark, Carter & Wags walk down the highway to the hotel that has a bar attached called, "Rumours." Some crack-head follows Carter outside and asks him to help him kill himself and then when the 3 guys are walking back to the motel, the crackheads start following them. Wags is drunkenly lagging behind, Carter & Mark are trying to make him hurry up and Mark sees a mop on the side of the rode and breaks off the handle to use as a weapon, just in case. This cracked me up the next morning.

7/27/07 - NYC - The Lakeside Lounge

In the morning, the asian lady running the motel literally walks right into our room as soon as we open the door. It is not even 10am and she just starts emptying the trash and speaking to us in incomprehensible broken english. So much for a wake up call. She makes Carter nervous and he forgets his pillow there. She kept saying, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6....too much!! Too much!!"

Chris with the "too much!" lady:


We leave NJ heading for NY, get slightly lost in Allentown and it was such a cute town, it was a delightful accidental detour. We joke that Wags and I should steal a baby and start a new life for ourselves there. We stop at Cracker Barrel for breakfast near BJ's Wholesale Club. Many BJ jokes ensue. Get to NYC - (mental note for next band trips to NYC) - i guess you can't take payload/trailer through the Holland Tunnel because of 9/11, so we get re-routed to the Lincoln Tunnel to get into the city. Drive through the fashion district and find the venue as easy as you can in NYC, near Tompkins Square Park in Alphabet City. Pay $40 to park, homeboys are checkin' out our trailer so we have to take turns guarding it for approx 3 hours until load-in. We go explore and take turns getting pizza & beers at the bar and guarding the trailer until load-in, it was really hot & sweaty. Lakeside Lounge was a really cool bar with a black & white photo booth. many photos were taken. Drank so many pints of free Brooklyn Lager and played a good set. Katie Harkelroad, Adam Anderson, James Wagner, McCoy's old friend Rob and his sister Jess and Erin's old friend Evan all come among other friends. Evan and I do one-hitters in the park, listening to bag-pipes and laughing children on the most magical nyc summer eve that ever twas. Awesome times. The boys pack up the van and we leave at approx 11PM for Providence, RI where we'll next lay our heads. We get some road pops and hit the road...

7/28/07 - Providence, RI @ The Penalty Box w/ Barn Burning

We arrive in Providence, RI around 2:30am at Anthony & Ashley's place & James (drummer for BB) is just about to move into the downstairs apt and it's empty except for 3 air mattresses already blown up and ceiling fans spinning. HEAVEN. Sleep awesome, wake up and go get delicious breakfast at The Classic Cafe. Then we go to AS220 with Anthony where he's got a solo performance in the afternoon for some environmental benefit thingy. They want $6 to get in so we just get beers and hang out outside, Sean Wright and his puppy come meet us, so awesome to see him and hang out.

Sean & Carter:


Go back to Anthony's for naps & showers. Chris, Mark & I walk to Hope Street Pizza and ate delicious dinner, then head to the show at the Penalty Box, just a few blocks away. It's a sports bar that happens to have music occassionally and has a regular kinda crowd.

Anthony & Kate from Barn Burning:


We play with The Returnarounds (their reunion) and Barn Burning and get sweet Tony Danzig t-shirts as souvenirs. Sean, his lady Megan and our old friend Lisa from Columbus (who now lives in NYC but was visiting in RI), come to the show. Everyone got trashed & had a great time. Mark raged & kicked the van door, Wags had to talk him down, James Wagner showed me his scar, Mark asked for someone to hold. We all drank and laughed utnil we passed the fuck out.

7/29/07 - free day, heading towards Thomas, WV (10 hours away)

Chris, Jess, Wags & James get breakfast at a Hope St diner and it was delicious. We pack up and say goodbye to our good friends in Barn Burning and to James Wagner who is heading to see family next in New England and take off towards WV, hoping to hit Harrisburg, PA by nightfall. It took FOREVER on 95-S, sooo much traffic and rain today. Driving back through/near NYC was so stupid. Get to a Super 8 just outside Harrisburg, PA and we split a bottle of Cuervo Citron in about 35 minutes and listen to David Byrne. I request some "Jess Time" (alone girl time to smoke a J, watch some entertainment television and take a long shower) and Carter tells me while shaving that he wants me to spent Jess Time with him. I don't think he understands. I finally convince the guys to go out without me.

The guys at The Cave - near Harrisburg, PA:




Chris with the DJ @ The Cave:


They end up in a hillbilly bar with a 70-year-old guy who looks like Buck Owens spinnin' hip-hop that they are all line-dancing too. The guys said they've never experienced the record-skippin' so hard as when they walked in there. They get trashed and wake me up when they get home and I yell at them. Carter hops the fence in his boxers to jump in the pool. They finally pass out.

7/30/07 - Thomas, WV - The Purple Fiddle

We get going and find that our AAA TripTix is taking us through the mountains of WV & MD which our over-stressed van does not like one bit. We have to stop 3 times to let the van cool down for over 30 minutes each time.

So fucking hot in the van:


We literally were at the highest point in MD at over 3,300 feet at one point. It was beautiful but it was so hot and we couldn't turn the A/C on and just wanted to get there and not kill the van. We thought we heard a bear. I got excited about seeing some birds of prey and eventually had to take a pee on the side of the road.

On the side of the road, waiting for the van to cool down in WV mountains:


Carter gets spooked by some deer. Wags overhears at Sheetz, one hillbilly ask another if he liked beer and if he wanted to come over to the trailer park later. We pass by a wind farm with like 20 of those huge wind combines. We finally get there and are greeted by the most bitchy hippie we've ever met. She talks to us like we are children and we are immediately turned off. There is NOTHING in this town but this coffeshop/B&B, a few antique shops, city hall and a gas station. All the houses are run down but The Purple Fiddle sits nicely on the river and thankfully has delicious food and IS the only thing to do in the town. I had the most awesome black bean burrito & tobuleh (or however you spell it). We play a great set, make the most money that night, strangely the dean of the law school from Capital University is there vacationing with his wife and they want us to do some 'entertaining' for their dinner parties, we'll see about that. We stay up on the back patio of the coffeehouse with 17-year-old Davis and street hippie Kip and his cat Butch. Kip plays us some of his blues songs and tells us about taking PCP in '77 and seeing Led Zep. There is arm wrestling and weird, drunk Brad trying to give us pizza and directions and doing drive by's when he was supposed to be getting us more beer. We all sleep in the B&B in bunk beds. Chris & Mark aren't happy about this. Butch the cat greets us in the morning.

photos from the evening on the purple fiddle's patio:



















7/31/07 - Pittsburgh, PA - Garfield Artworks

We get going, pretty uneventful drive through a different route that has less mountains and through some richy-rich town on the lake where it's like a summer-boating/winter-ski resort, absolutely beautiful. We stop at a TGIFriday's and Carter buys shirts & socks at Target. We get into Pittsburgh early and get to the venue and the guy who runs the place tells us to come back at 7PM. Jess & Carter have to pee in a bike shop down the street with the most disgusting toilet with no seat. eww. We got 2 & 1/2 hours to kill.

Pittsburgh's Saving Grace:




I call Koren and she meets us at the Church Brew Works where we have lots of beer and pizza. Her man Eric comes down and has a few with us too, good to meet him and they both come ot the show later too - great to see them both. We get back to the venue right at 7pm and the dude doesn't show up until 7:45pm. we are all severely annoyed, hot, exhausted, last show of the tour. thankfully we have a cooler full of beer and that fuels the notion to do a really loud, metal set with the cooler on stage and leave as soon as we are done as we all want to get the eff home. there may or may not have been someone drunkenly trying to steal records and getting caught during the evening too. Carter unfortunately, accidentally lets the last band borrow a tom and although kevin finn was a really nice guy, we felt stuck there while the guy is recording what seems like an extra long set. I talk with Manny about Gil Mantera & Scrawl and Columbus hip-hop. We finally get to leave around 12:30am and get lost for 30 minutes trying to get out of Pittsburgh which makes us all angrier. Wags & McCoy immediately pass out in the van. Mark gets us back into town safe & sound around 3:30 and we are all home by 4:45am Wednesday morning, exhausted and happy to be home.