Update from the Road: 3/10 - 3/13

Hello everyone,

I just thought I'd update everyone on what's going on right now. After the last couple of attempts to type this up, I finally get a chance to do this. Here's what went down over the time period of the last couple of days.

FRIDAY 3/10:
I started my drive to Arizona at about 11:30am. My original intentions were to drive to San Diego and take the 8, but my mom checked the weather forecast for the area around the 8 and she said that there were gonna be snow blizzards and 3 to 4 inches of snow falling. So, I got an alternate route.

I drove through alot of towns in Riverside County. Mainly the Temecula, Hemet area. Got up to the 10 and started the long drive. I drove through Indio where they hold the Coachella Music Festival every year. It was cool to see that. It was really cool driving by yourself and seeing the open road and parts of America you rarely get to see. The skies and everything were just unbelieveably awesome. I took a bunch of pictures so I might do a picture blog on here at the end of my trip.

Stopped at the Flying J and got gas and some Wendy's before the Arizona border. The sky and clouds were pretty awesome there too.

I got into Phoenix at about 6:30 and headed over to the Brickhouse where Peachcake was playing. I helped them sell merch for their show. They played with Polysics (from Japan) and Los Abandoned. It was a pretty good turnout. I'd say probably about 70 to 80 kids. Peachcake put on a pretty good set. Alot of kids were getting into it. Didn't really watch of Los Abandoned's set. I talked with them afterwards. They were pretty cool people. Polysics was something else. They were kinda like Devo but full on rock and punk like. They were good the first half hour, but they started get boring after a while. I think they played for about an hour and fifteen minutes. I think that was way too long. But then again, they're from Japan and I guess they wanna get the most out of each city. Ah well.

After the show, we all went back to the Peachcake house in Tempe and hung out. I met Jesse's cat, Sebastian. He was one of the coolest cats I'd ever seen. Seeing and playing with him made me miss my cat, Simba. I'll be back soon enough to see him. We watched Waiting for a little bit. Funny flick. We talked alot about music and their new record. I can't wait to hear it. Had alot of Domino's. It was tasty. Went to bed around 2:30 or so.

SATURDAY 3/11:
Woke up and showered around 11:30. We started packing and getting everything ready for the next week of shows. We had a show in Tucson and we were suppose to be there around 2, but we didn't leave the house until 2:30 or so.

We got to the venue at around 4:15 or so. The show was at Club Congress. It was a venue/bar/hotel. I had heard stories from beforehand that this place had some haunted room or that the whole hotel itself was haunted. We walked around the hotel a little bit. The place had really cool artwork all around the place. We took pictures all over the hotel in hope to find ghosts in the picutres. No luck. We went upstairs and there was an entrance to the rooftop and we heard a squaking sound coming through the door. Me and John walked back down, but Jake stayed up there. Jake all of a sudden comes running down the stairs saying he heard some say "Please help me!" We were kinda freaked out about it, but we forgot abouit it. We back up there later and we found out that it was just a storage room above the hotel and that it was most likely someone in one of the rooms nearby. It was still creepy.

We started setting up for the show. Peachcake was suppose to go at 6:30, but something happened with their equipment or one of the cables and start 30 minutes late and only played 20 minutes. There wasn't many kids there. Probably 25 tops. We packed up everything after Los Abandoned played.

We were really hungry, so we went to this pizza place a few minutes from the venue. I think it was called Brooklyn Pizza, but it was pretty good for the most part. They had garlic knots, which I didn't have in forever. They were pretty good.

After we ate, we started our long, long drive to Dallas. We drove for about 5 hours or so until we stopped in El Paso and got a hotel. We went to bed at 5 in the morning.

SUNDAY 3/12:
We woke and showered and checked out of the hotel at around Noon or so. Jake's eye had been bothering him the last couple of days. So, we went to a nearby hospital and had him get checked out. We were there for about 3 and a half hours. A band that Peachcake played with before called The Kurk stopped by the hospital and hung out with us. There were a couple little boys there waiting on their sick sister and we gave them free cds and autographed them.

Jake got out of the doctors around 4:30 and we all were straving. We all went to this Mexican restraunt called Barrigo. It was pretty cool. The menus were wood pizza plates. I got the chicken enchiladas. They were decent. The refried beans were amazing.

Afterwards, we said goodbye to The Kurk and started our long drive to Dallas at around 6:30. We made many various gas station stops and whatnot. We continued to drive throughout the night.

MONDAY 3/13:
We made it into to Dallas at about 6 in the morning. We had drove for about 11 or 12 hours. We were happy we made it though. We started looking for a hotel and we thought we saw the JFK assassination memorial, but we were wrong. It was apparently a tree of hope or something. The setting and everything looked like the JFK memorial with the book depository across the street from the memorial, but it wasn't the real deal.

We stopped at a gas station and asked if there were any hotels around the area and multiple crack addicts talked to us. Before we left the gas station, Stefan noticed that there were a bunch of birds sitting on the same telephone wire. There was probably about 30 birds on the wire. As soon as we were pulling out of the gas station, we saw this huge flash of light come from behind us. Apparently, the telephone pole exploded and barbequed a bunch of the birds. It was absolutely insane.

We started looking for hotels all around the area. We found one hotel that $19 per couple and the place looked like one of those abandoned hotels you see in scary movies or like in that movie "Identity" where 10 people all of a sudden start dying. It looked really bad.

We found a Hampton Inn in Downtown Dallas. $100 for today and tomorrow morning, but we get a free continental breakfast, which I might add was fucking amazing!, and free wireless internet. That's how I'm typing this as we speak.

So, the current status is that we're in Dallas, TX, were playing a show tonight at 6, everyone is sleeping, I'm on the internet and I need to get some sleep before the show. If we get another hotel with wireless internet in Austin, you'll probably be seeing more of these in the next couple of days. So until then, I hope you enjoyed my update, if you made it that far, and you'll hear more about soon enough. Talk to everyone soon. Love you and miss you!

Mike.