Tour Diary: Day 1
Unlabeled pictures are in my Flickr acct)

Today’s plans began with a simple task: Pick up the minivan reserved for us at Enterprise.

This plan was complicated when Enterprise changed the terms of the rental agreement without notice. Originally, the requirements were that the primary driver has a license and a credit card, on which they will put a $200 hold until the car is returned.

When we attempted to rent the car, we discovered that they had changed the terms to require a hold being placed on the credit card for the full amount of the rental, plus $100.

Given that the full rental cost is well above the credit limit of anyone involved in this little adventure, this caused a few problems.

These problems were made even more pressing by the fact that I had spent an entire day on the phone earlier in the week, during which time I discovered that Enterprise was the only car rental company within 50 miles that had any vans available.

Not having a van would mean we would have to cancel the entire tour, 12 hours before we were scheduled to play our first show.

I ended up knocking on the door of every car rental company in the cities of South Bend and New Carlyle, hoping for some kind of miracle — and in an incredibly rare stroke of luck, the final car rental company in the area had just received an early van return.

It wasn’t just any crappy minivan, either. It was a fullsized touring van. The kind with reading lights, and blinds on the windows.

I am sitting in it right now. It is very nice indeed.

After somehow coming up with a massive cash deposit (which would not have been possible without the foresight and generosity of my leslie-bee), we rented the van and headed back to home base.

Almost as if by magic, a delivery van arrived at the same time we did. Suddenly, we were armed with all 1000 copies of the new compilation CD that we’re releasing, as well as an advance shipment of the new Cyanotic and Ad·ver·sary shirts.

My friends, let me tell you something. I was very worried about these adversary shirts. The design I submitted was complicated and difficult to screenprint, the inks I chose were unusual and exotic, and the base t-shirts I asked for were extraordinarily expensive (using sweatshop-free materials is a very costly thing). If I had gone with a standard white-ink-on-generic-black-material tshirt, I could have gotten four times the number of shirts I got for the same amount of money; and so I was very worried.

Until I actually saw them, that is. These are some fucking awesome shirts.

Seriously. Fucking awesome.

So, we somehow manage to tetris a thousand CDs, a hunded shirts, six people, five equipment rigs and four fullsized luggage cases into this van, and then it’s off to Allegan, Michigan.

The venue itself was fantastic, and reminded me a fair bit of The Haunt in Ithaca. (There was a local opening band which played a pretty fucked-up cross of metal, prog, and post-rock. It was pretty weird.)

The set went well, mostly. My laptop did a lot of very interesting things that it never did during practice (of course), so for our encore we played two songs that we fucked up the first time around. It was much more awesome than it sounds – the second time around, everyone knew how the songs went and were much more into it. There was even a mosh pit at one point, which was pretty impressive considering that it was a relatively small turnout.

The sound tech asked us for our contact info and a copy of our CD, as his friend is a guitarist for Rob Zombie and Ozzy Osbourne, and also happens to manage the booking for Ozzfest. He was of the opinion that we should join the tour next summer, which would indeed be awesome, but I’m not going to get my hopes up.

It would be pretty fucking cool, though.

…

Tour Diary – Day 2

Due to an equipment failure (alarm clock), we were late getting on the road to our Columbus show. We’re all running on Very Little Sleep, so things are very smelly, scruffy, and twitchy.

We also got a speeding ticket, which was nice.