Wake up call comes early and we head down to the Broadway Diner for breakfast, gas up the truck, and point this show SOUTH. It’s to be a good haul today. About seven or eight hours of road to get us to Lethbridge for tonight’s show.
Again, it’s unusual landscape for us so the drive is not boring. It’s more big sky, flats, rolling hills. As we head south-west it gets a bit more rolling. We stop in Rosetown, SK, and visit the local diner (or rather terrorize it!). We are perhaps a bit stir crazed from being in the truck! We end up meeting probably half the town, being served free coffee and muffins, and getting little Rosetown, SK, pins, before being sent on our way. We think we see somebody from the Guess Who on the main street. But we can’t remember his name. Is it Randy or Burton? I don’t know.
It’s cold on the prairie, and there is ice on some of the ponds. A winter sky, perhaps.
Lethbridge is exactly where I left it the last time through. We roll into the Slice, and are greeted by Jess and his friendly staff. Big Dave and I had a great time here last year, and I have not wanted to pump it up too much in advance in case it was different this time. But no fears. We are immediately welcomed, fed great pizza and drinks. We have a quick sound check, and Jess, as last year, has this place sounding GREAT. It’s to be a late start so Michael and I go out to the truck and sleep in our seats for a couple of hours. At least there is a warm, south wind blowing here, so we are reasonably comfortable. We’ll worry about accommodations after the show. I wake up and both my hands are asleep. Odd! But I’m OK, and soon we are inside and it’s showtime.
There’s a bunch of grad students from the university that bought advance tickets and got to the gig early. They’ve got a table right up front, so we socialize a bit with them, and they prove to be fun and wonderful to play to. The lights are bright enough that I can’t see the rest of the audience from my seat on stage. But all in all it’s a good crowd. The sound is terrific, and I believe we are giving perhaps the best show of the tour. At the end of the night we sell a lot of CD’s, raffle off a tour jacket. Hey, Jess won the Tour jacket! The second booker on Tour to do this. Not fixed, really. But a nicer guy could not of won this coat! Gary Kendall at the Silver Dollar Room in Toronto, ON, was the other booker to win. We eat pizza again before heading out into the night to find a motel. The Slice is a great gig. It's a destination. Go there.
When we do find a motel, it has the slowest check in in the western world. What? Thirty or forty minutes to do the paperwork, figure who gets which rooms… I hit the pillow hard when I finally get one.
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