The Stills Day 18-20, SFO-YOW-SEA

Day 2 in San Francisco began with a walk around the hotel area, which featured a great strip on Polk St. that had lots of amazing coffee shops and restaurants. 3 of us went for a coffee, stopped in a place for a reasonable breakfast, then I went on to Guitar Center to pick up some supplies, and walked around a bit more. It was raining on and off all morning, so that was a little unpleasant, but the F14 fighter jets later on in the day more than made up for that.

 

The one thing that’s interesting about SF is that they have lots of homeless people. They all seem to be out of it, most of them are crackheads and it’s pretty intimidating, but for the most part they’re harmless and provide great entertainment. For example, I saw one man stumbling and screaming his way down the sidewalk, when he just stopped and dropped his pants and pissed on a newspaper box.

 

So, about the fighter jets… turns out it was fleet week and they were racing them around the city. It was pretty wild. Loud and fast, fun to watch, it lasted most of the afternoon, or at least til we got to the venue.

 

The Independent is a cool mid-size bar. Lots of people out for this one; it was almost sold out. It was a fun night. After the show, the guys went and partied with The Dears, also from MTL, who happened to be in town, but I had to go straight to bed because I had an unbelievably early flight back to Ottawa for my sister’s wedding.

 

So, the next morning at 4am, I woke up and made my way to the airport for a long flight home. At 5pm EST I touched down, went straight to a bar to play a show, then to a big family dinner. That lasted a little while, so by the time I got to bed it was almost 1:30am. I had to be up at 8am to go for pictures, then there was the ceremony, then more pics all afternoon, and of course the reception and dinner. Not to mention that I had to play some classical guitar at the ceremony… That made for a long day. By the time the cake was cut, I had 2 hours to sleep before getting back on an airplane.

 

The only bonus about the flights today was that when I got to Chicago, there was a flight to Seattle leaving within 10 minutes, so I got to skip the stopover time and go straight out. It was rough… realllly rough, but I made it to Seattle where I was finally able to crash for a couple hours before coming to work.

 

The Showbox is a really cool and decent sounding room. We just had dinner at a great Chinese place next door called Genghis Khan. Amazing, really insanely good food. Now, just a show to go, tomorrow is BUS DAY!!! And then I can sleep for two days on the way to St. Paul, MN. Good times to be had by all…