I'm gearing up today for some shows on the East Coast over the next few weeks. I finally stepped away from the piano and am packing my bags at my parents' house, where I am tonight. Today is Father's Day, and so tonight Dad and I will probably eat ice cream for dinner. Hooray! I know we don't NEED holidays in order to celebrate, but it's sometimes nice to have an arbitrary reason.
This last big drive that I made across the country was absurd in so many ways. First off, I got pulled over in Nebraska by a state trooper for drinking and driving. True story. I made a huge batch of iced green tea before I left, and I couldn't fit all of it in my Nalgene bottle. The only other container I had was an empty bottle of red wine, so I got a funnel and poured the rest of the tea in the wine bottle. The cop had seen me slugging fluid directly out of the wine bottle as I passed him, and so he clearly pulled me over. Of course, I didn't get a ticket, but he did encourage me not to reuse empty alcohol bottles in the future. Amen, state trooper...amen.
Next, the car stereo blew out, unexpectedly. I know it's nice to have "quiet time," but 9 hours of silence in the car was brutal. I told my Dad about the broken radio, and he called Subaru, who said it would cost $500 to fix, so essentially, repairing the stereo is going to fall into the "notgonnahappenanytimesoon" category. Because I'm going to be in the car so much over the next few weeks, today Dad rigged up an old boom box in the passenger seat (this is why we celebrate Dads!). I may bust out a few of my old-school albums to take with me. Since I'll be rocking a boom box, it seems appropriate.
Back to the drive. Finally, there was the Weather (with a capital "W"). The sky turned green just before Des Moines and the clouds started looking like an impressionist painting of clouds. Without a radio, I had no way of knowing if the weather service was issuing any kind of storm warnings. But I actually found out soon enough. A couple of minutes later, I drove UNDERNEATH a funnel cloud. I've never seen anything quite like it. There was no where to pull over legitimately until I got to Little Amana in Iowa, where I waited out the storm at Wasserbahn, some crazy indoor waterpark. It was surreal to go from the actual storm outside to a bunch of soaking wet kids screaming and jumping from waterslides inside.
And thus begins my trip. What a way to start...
