Pawnshop Diamond

Left Windsor on a high note after playing the Phog Lounge. Great space, great people. 2.5 hours to London where we found a park to kick Dave's soccer ball around. God that guy doesn't stop ...

London. Fall weather. Poor Dave was cold that night with the furnace broken. Also, he got woken up by a cat that 'needed' to be fed every two hours. However, we continued going through the great selection of Ontario beers found at The Beer Store. If you are in Ontario, I recommend the Waterloo Dark, Steam Whistle and the Welllington Special Pale Ale ... not the President's Choice that one guy told us to get, as he returned 6 flats of Coors Light! Oh, and we got a parking ticket, which we successfully contested at City Hall the next morning before heading to Peterborough.

We all loved playing The Spill in Peterborough. Some great restaurants, copious amounts of book stores and cool people. Good little university town. The Spill has a room upstairs - very convenient since none of us wanted to drive - that Jaime immediately reorganized. Slightly grungy to say the least but still a relief after driving the 401 in the pouring rain! Played two encores to a bunch of drunk Trent University students. Loads of fun and a great venue to play in.

Lynn

So, we arrived in Windsor on a cloudless afternoon, with the picturesque backdrop of Detroit dominating the landscape. It was so close that we could hear the Detroit skytrain (or what they call the People Carrier) rumbling across the Detroit River. The abundant amount of American flags flying high in the deceivingly majestic GM building waved back to the pathetic Canadian flags hanging out of four story apartment windows. We stayed in an apartment near the waterfront with a dude named Chris, who played Pawnshop on a local radio station.

Micburg is probably not how you spell this place and may or may not be it's actual name. Lynn told me that's what it was called on the drive in to town, which is Pembroke, on our way to try to buy fuses for the guitar amps. But before I get to Micburg, I should explain about the guitar amps. Before we left Ottawa we stopped at Long & McQuade to pick up guitar amps for Katie and Dave and a bass amp for Lynn. We also picked up a pretty little drum kit for me at Dave's Drum Shop. We found ingenious ways of packing everything into the van and headed off to Toronto with everything going according to plan. With rentals, it very seldom does though, and it turned out when we set up I was missing a tom mount for the drum kit and had to play short one drum. The amps were fine in soundcheck but when we took the stage one wouldn't turn on. At all. Nothing. With some scrambling and help from Adam, the sound tech at C'est What we got the show up and running. Back at the house I did some trouble shooting with the dead amp, found the fuse and sure enough it was blown. In one of my less clever moves, I took the good fuse from the working amp and put it in the problem amp to test it out. The bad amp blew that one too leaving us with zero fuses and zero working guitar amps, on a Sunday, which every musician in Canada knows is the one day of the week that Long & McQuade is never, ever open.

Luckily the backline (drum kit and amps) for our Sunday night show in Kingston were going to be supplied by one of the other bands and the venue. We packed up the van after a leisurely morning in Toronto and headed out making sure to point out the CN tower for Dave. (Ask him about it, he was really excited). The Kingston show was at the Mansion, which is a great little bar with a music room upstairs. Apparently the couple of days before were the apex of welcome week at Queen's University. We heard that there were some big student parties that got right out of hand resulting in clashes with police and people being sent to jail. I figure this must be pretty standard though in a town where the largest 3 portions of the population are (in order, I believe): university students, the armed forces, and inmates. Anyway everyone was hungover on Sunday and not many people came to our show, which is too bad because I think we played a really good one. The few people who were there enjoyed themselves though including Will, the guy from the venue so hopefully we'll come back. We also enjoyed listening to Arctic, who were on after us. We only heard a song or two of We Were Lovers before we hit the road since we (and by we I mean Lynn) had to drive 3 hours to his parents place before the night was out.

So now we're in Micburg, which may or may not be a real name, enjoying a couple of days off at Lynn's parents house. Last night we played a little acoustic show for Lynn's folks and some neighbours. Lynn's brother Dave took the amps into Ottawa and got us new ones. Champions League soccer will be on the big screen in a couple of hours and the coffee is plentiful so Dave and I are happy as can be.

Tomorrow morning we do the long drive to Windsor.

Lucas