notes from the road....

hello to all you good folks.

I thought I'd take a moment to regail you with a few updates from
my north american travels. I'm still in Canada now as I write with
one show left to play. knowing me this will probably be a lengthy
monologue. beware. if you're one of the more productive of the
species you better go do something else with the next ten minutes
of your life.

it's been an interesting couple of weeks.

I left Australia at the end of September to head to Canada to play
some shows over here with my buddy and Aussie expat Matt Irvin.
he's been based in New York and Winnipeg for the last eight
months and he was up for putting a small tour together.

leaving Australia wasn't without incident - the night before I was due
to fly I played Mojos in Fremantle but my car broke down (fuel
pump) and I spent the whole night waiting for mechanics and tow
truck drivers. anyways, a day later I was en route to Singapore. a
tardy booking had meant I needed to fly to Singapore, Los
Angeles, Toronto and then on to Winnipeg for the first show. don't
bother with getting out your atlas or google earth - suffice to say it
was a stupidly long way to get there.

half way there and the Aussie Rules Grand Final was due to start
while I was waiting in the LAX departure lounge. the sports bars
were full of tvs showing baseball so I dropped ten bucks on an
instant wireless connection to watch the first quarter on my laptop.
but nothing would stream so it was a play-by-play notation on the
AFL website of Geelong dominating the Kangas that sustained me.
after the boarding call, some faithful die-hards at home kept the
sms updates coming in while sitting in the plane delayed on the
runway. by the time I had to turn my phone off the score was
looking like a sure thing for Geelong. this would be a good omen for
the tour.

Matt met me as a weary and dehydrated specimen in Winnipeg
some 40 hours of flying later, but in good spirits.

after retrieving guitars unharmed, we tooled around town, saw the
sights and then headed out to watch a CFC football game - my first
- as the hometown Bombers dispensed with Hamilton in a close
game. american football takes some getting used to as the stop-
start plays mean your passion is by necessity a very measured
business but Matt's cousin Chuck had me oriented to the
strategies. after that finished I headed home and crashed out. it'd
been almost sixty hours without any real sleep and I was done.

we played Winnipeg on the Monday. the place was an 'Aussie'
style pub called the Billabong which was packed full of Matt's
relatives and I guy who was the spitting image of Kav Temperley
from Eskimo Joe. complete with the scarf. the gig went really well,
Matt delivered a killer 'home-town' set and the Winnipegians
seemed to like my tunes on the whole.

Tuesday we headed out of Winnipeg across the prairies in the
direction of Saskatoon. We got as far as Yorkton and then arose
the next morning and kept trucking.

the prairies are bloody incredible. the skies are vast, the land is
flat, the clouds are ever changing and there are colours that are too
vivid for words. I took about 300 photos in the first week and 250 of
them are of the changing skies. what's more is that many of the
shots look like I've used editing software to make them so vivid. but
that's just how it is out there. I chatted to locals about it and some
just shook my hand in a quiet knowing and the others probably
thought I was mad. but not everyone has the feeling that they're
driving through a Turner painting.

Saskatoon is a pretty little place (locals boast that it's the Paris of
the Prairies) with six large bridges running across a beautiful river.
the show went ok but it probably wasn't the best venue for what we
were doing. the next morning we headed for a place called the
Wanuskewin Park run by First Nation people - Cree - that was a
very powerful place. an historic camping area on tributary rivers
there were a bunch of former buffalo (bison) jumps, ceremonial
grounds, installations etc but most of all the place had a resonant
peace to it. we left there for Regina feeling charged and restored.

pulling in to Regina felt like pulling in to what I imagine a part of
Detroit or Michigan might be like. brown, industrial, harsh and
noisy. we stayed at the iconic Plains Hotel that we learnt later on
was the heart of the less salubrious area of town. the tattooed biker
(replete with gang colours) that gave me directions to our venue
was very cordial though as were the patrons of the hard core blues
club below when we loaded back in at 2am. the show went well
and the turn out was pretty respectable. the next morning someone
we'd met showed us around town a little before we decided to head
south.

I've always wanted to go to Montana. I can't explain it. perhaps it's
the romance of the open spaces or the horses or something but I've
always pledged I'd get there. now, with a few days hole in the
schedule it seemed like an ideal opportunity to duck below the
border and see it first hand. Matt, being the intrepid traveller that he
is, took little convincing and we headed towards the border.

beyond Moose Jaw we headed south and made it as far as
Assiniboia, a little farming town of hard drinkers, pick up trucks and
grain bins. we were warned earlier not to go there because it'd be
an 'indian town'. the fattened grain-fed white farmers that we found
there would have long sinced pushed any 'indians' out in to the
shadows beyond the wheat silos and the moon drenched paddocks
that ran for miles and miles and miles. and if they hadn't, the
110dB hard rock cover band doing soundcheck in the bar we
landed in would have been a handy fall-back position with enough
Creed and long haired guitar solos to drive anyone out of town. we
holed up there for the night, drank the local beer, played the local
pool rules and smiled at the pretty local girls with their local
boyfriends. it was a friendly enough place but one where you
watched your words to ensure no-one felt put out enough to want to
put you out of sorts any more. trading caps at the end of the night
with one of the harder drinking locals seemed like acceptance by
the time we stumbled out of there, watching out for the town's local
shiny blue sedan with the lights atop. we never saw it.

we spent most of the next day driving around the Badlands near
the border, watching the prairie plains take on a new undulation
with gulches and gullies and breakaways. we saw almost no-one
all day. a family of wolves ran in front of us and then up to the far
ridge as we looked on from the road's edge. it was just them and
us and a few distant horses.

crossing the border in to the US and Montana was easier than
anyone could have imagined. I get nervous any time I have to deal
with US officials and their collective inability to think for themselves
but after dealing with a pair of friendly homeland security folks I
was almost surprised when they didn't offer us a beer for the rest of
the trip. it was all very straightforward.

and then it was in to Montana. soft overcast skies and long and
gently rolling plains of unfenced wheatfield stubble that felt like
slow smooth breaths. we drove like this for hours. past the
abandoned St Marie, down towards Glasgow and on towards
Malta. after seeing wandering calves and grazing deer in the
peripheral throw of the headlights we got a cheap room in a
roadside motel from a very friendly middle aged lady. our first post-
border-crossing conversation with an American went something like
this:

"so where are you guys from?"

"Australia. we've driven down from Canada today"

"oh really? I couldn't tell with the accents. so you drove all that
way?"

"what, you mean did we drive from Canada? yeah sure, we crossed
the border this afternoon"

"no, I meant did you drive all the way from Australia? It must be a
long way to drive from there to here."

"we flew in to Canada".

"oh that's ok then. that'd be a long drive otherwise".

she was a lovely lady and ran a nice hotel with the best shower of
the trip. across the railway line we found a great little bar and a
counter meal and $2.50 premium beers and Montana was getting
better by the minute. a country band was setting up. the stetsons
were out in full force and the super friendly country folks were
buying beers with us round for round.

line of the tour - delivered by a forty-something stetson-wearing
man with a wry grin:

"I used to miss my ex.... but my aim's just getting better all the
time"

sand was thrown down on the floor for the dancers and the tightest
country band you might hear fired up. impressed by the telecaster-
weilding guitar gun in the corner I went over in their first break to
talk shop with him and chew the fat about guitars. a few bars in to
chatting he nodded, pulled out some chewing tobacco and said,

"so, you're the lead picker then are you?"

me not being the 'lead picker' meant that we obviously had a lot
less to talk about than I'd imagined and my cue to return to the bar
gracefully followed quickly.

the rest of the night was a pretty colourful affair but Matt and I
agreed easily upon a retreat to the motel when all the country
songs were sounding the same. we left the town in the morning
and headed further south and west to our destination of Whitefish,
Montana.

now that we're north of the border again, we're heading for a gig in
Kelowna, British Columbia tomorrow after having spent all day
being amazed by the Rockies. absolutely incredible. like a different
planet.

that's it from me for now. there's a guy on the television that Matt's
watching who is quoting from 2 Corinthians while a text prompt
says:
"Call Now for your FREE, LARGER, Miracle Spring Water"...

(capitalisation his). it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me
either but it sounds convincing. I got to go and get me some. he's
promising "a personal financial explosion!"

peace to all.

Simon.

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