Shinybass Journal Entry 12/12/19

One more trip around the sun…

Or should that be one more trip away from my sons? Read it however you want, but I made it one more year, just shy of ‘dust’ as my friends like to say. Who am I kidding? I don’t have any friends…

Seriously, though, here we are with (yet) another birthday celebrated on the road. If you know me at all, I don’t celebrate on just one day. That’s not on purpose, I promise. It’s just that my schedule notoriously disrupts any chance of a ‘normal’ birthday, so I try to make due with what I’m dealt. The family had my birthday before I left for the road, and I’ll share details of this years’ shenanigans in a few.

Past birthdays on the road have been, well, interesting, to say the least. One year I was in the middle of Ohio playing a terrible bar while sick as a dog. Another year I was in Vegas, then rented a car and drove 2 hours into the desert to find the back gate of area 51. Then ate at the Little A’le’inn and drove back. Another year in Vegas I went out with the boys, only to find out the next day that my Step Dad had died on my birthday. (To honor him this year, I wore one of his neckties on the 7th for our Christmas show).

Bittersweet as they are, my birthdays on the road, as with every day out here, are full of some kind of adventure. There’s a great saying in baseball – ‘Come to the ballpark, you’ll see something you’ve never seen before!’, which describes our lives out here daily. Routine we ain’t.

But I digress. Let me back up just a little bit and get you ramped up as to what we’ve been up to on the road lately. We are on the Holiday and Hits Tour with Lonestar. The band and crew are great, so it’s a relatively easy tour. Just like with any family, we have our slight disagreements, but since we are all grown folks, the ‘drama’ is at a minimum. The tour is pretty extensive, with a lot of shows in a short period of time, which is taxing. It’s not the most fun being away from home for so long, and the long bus rides through no-man’s land with trickling wi-fi and limited cell service doesn’t help, either. But it could be much worse.

Oddly enough, we started our Christmas tour without Lonestar (that tricky scheduling conflict…), so we jumped in solo in the great and frigid city of Milwaukee. Of course we went to Calderone Club for lunch, which was just a massive carb-loading, food-coma inducing wonderful hot mess of a lunch, with a lovely cab to top it off. If it sounds like I’m bragging, don’t worry, I am.

So then the ‘tour’ began, however, I wasn’t quite ready for that. The bus left Milwaukee for a 3 day journey to Seattle. Half of us flew home, half stayed on the bus. I had a birthday to get to, plus, any days I can see my family is worth any sleep I may lose in the process. We then headed far west to Seattle, ultimately across the water in Bremerton.

If I am in a city really early, I am going to get out. It turns out this was the case, so I headed for the water to watch the sea lions play in the frigid morning as the good people of Bremerton read their phones and drank their coffee waiting on the ferry to Seattle. I scoping the local museums for opening times. Yeah, I’m spoiled.

I hit the US Navy Museum and toured the USS Turner Joy. Fun fact – every Navy vessel, whether a sub, carrier, or tug boat – smells exactly the same. I also took a side trip to a local bar, where some 10 years ago I was able to see a small piece of history firsthand. Apparently there was a sailor based at Bremerton many decades ago that liked to draw. He painted 4 huge cartoons on the walls of the basement of this particular bar. Well, the man went on to create Popeye the Sailor. And here are his precursor works:

We then headed down to Lincoln City, OR, which is a sleepy seaside town known for exceptional seafood and whale watching. I love that the towns that dot the coast are pretty much corporate-free, meaning if you want eggs, dammit, you sit down next to the locals and eat freshly prepared eggs. And hopefully some salmon with it. Can I go back now?

I rented a car, and with a couple hours before soundcheck, I took off and headed south. Just started driving. I walked the beach in Taft, listening to the harbor seals bark at each other, then ended up in Depoe Bay and spent some time in the whale-watching center. They say a couple smaller grey whales were in the bay, but I’ll be honest: I didn’t see them. After our show, Phil and the band went to a local watering hole. We shot pool and sang Karaoke waaaaay too late.A great birthday precursor for sure.

The next day Michael (guitarist from Lonestar), David Black and myself hopped in the rental and set out for my actual birthday celebration. We started at the Grateful Bread Bakery for Gingerbread pancakes and too much coffee, then up to the Tillamook Air Museum. After marveling at one of the largest wooden structures in the country, we started our journey back to home base. On the 101, I spied a park sign then turned around, mostly out of morbid curiosity. It turns out visiting Munson Creek Falls was the highlight of the day, and it was a 5 minute drive off the main drag and a 10 minute walk once out of the car. Just amazing. Yes, it was raining, yes, it was cold. I didn’t care. It was exceptional.

So then we had a loooong bus ride to Livermore, CA. You see touring math dictates that for every fantastic day out here, it seems there is an equally miserable one. We arrived at 2 in the afternoon, and it turns out there were zero food options near the hotel. So I walked a mile and a half for a late lunch, and did laundry. Such a rock star. Later that night, David and I hit the movies, which actually morphed the day into ‘nice’ rather than miserable.

Livermore is a nice town, and I enjoyed getting out and about. I had a friend come in from out of town to visit, and it was a true joy to catch up with him. The theater in Livermore is great, as are the people. Redding was fun as well, with a the fantastic Sundial Bridge being the pinnacle (no pun intended) of my morning walk, and the 1935-built theater was an art-deco masterpiece.

Which gets us 100% up to speed. Well, almost. We just spent 26 hours straight riding the bus to Colorado Springs. Now, on a bus there is a lounge and you have a bunk, but really the space is cramped as can be. I walked off the bus at 5:30 AM and just took some time to breathe in unfiltered air and stretch my legs for a while. The road can be glamorous on the outside, but I will be honest: it ain’t easy.

Stay tuned for the rest of the weeks’ updates, which includes 2 shows in Colorado, one in New Mexico, and one in Kansas. We should have called it the ‘100,000 Mile Tour’, which is how it feels…

See you on the road!