Day 6: Onto Dallas via Oklahoma
You wake up the day after your fifth show in five days in five different cities in four different states and feel pretty good about having a day off to rest. That is until you realize that the reward for your hard work is a 14 hour drive and the locale of your convalescence will be the inside of a van. Gotta love the indie band tour.
We left Taos at about 10am. There was about a two and a half hour drive back to I-40 in Albuquerque. Along the way we made a breakfast stop at Dunkin Donuts. Apparently, Dunkin is a favorite of a couple guys in the band and they are hard to find in California. They have a powdered chocolate crème filled donut that is basically a heart attack on a plate, but, that doesn’t make it any less delicious.
Once you hit I-40 you get the pleasure of staying on that road for about 400 miles. First you get to go across the rest of New Mexico. Then, you get a preview of driving across the long part of Texas by getting to cross the short par of Texas. It’s just as boring but not as long. Once we got to Albuquerque, Cuz’n Steve took the wheel. I told him, stay on this road until we get to Oklahoma City. That’s the odd thing about this drive. It’s actually faster to go across the short part of Texas, through half of Oklahoma, and then drop back down into Texas to get to Dallas. I told him he’d know when we were in Texas because he would see the biggest crucifix in the northern hemisphere.
About, three or four hours later, Cuz’n Steve calls to the back, “Hey, is this the cross you were talking about?” Ummm. It’s about 300 feet tall and has the wingspan of a B-52. “No, Steve that’s the small one, keep looking.”
We played poker a lot of the way to Dallas. At least until we pulled off somewhere in Oklahoma to get a sandwich at a truck stop. It was going to be a quick stop, but Cuz’n Steve and Genji ordered meatball sandwiches and they had just run out of meatballs. They told them it would be five minutes, which to me, makes me wonder just what kind of meat is used in the meatball that will be ready in five minutes. Oh, yeah, this was Subway sandwich number 2 on the trip, I tried the Philly Cheesesteak for the first time, in case you were wondering or even care.
I took over driving at this point. I took us through Oklahoma City and into Texas. Boody had downloaded these podcasts to his Ipod for the trip from some show called, Things You Oughta Know. It’s basically an internet talk show of these two guys covering a series of topics including: Are there dead bodies on Mt. Everest? (answer: yes about 120 of them); Weird ways to die? (getting trampled to death by a heard of sheep, and getting killed by an exploding molasses tank topped the list); Is the world going to end in 2012? (yes, if you are a crackpot moron, ok I paraphrased that one a bit); How do redheads work? (it turns out that redheads need more anesthetic to be put under for surgeries and stuff like that). It was an interesting show and it made the drive a lot more entertaining than just listening to music.
Somewhere about 100 miles from Dallas, we stopped for gas and Genji took over driving. By the time we reached Dallas and Steve’s brother’s place, it was about 2am. Steve’s brother Dave lives in a really nice high rise apartment building called The Mondrian in Dallas. We’d be sleeping on his floor and couches for tonight and the next night.
Tomorrow we would be playing a lunchtime show for the employees at the Nissan headquarters in Irving.