Friday, June 23, 2006

Day Off in San Antonio

Finally starting to feel human again. I've been sick since around the 12th. I've spent all my days off just laying around my hotel room. On show days (event days?), I'm miserable, up at 5:30am and I usually head to the bus around midnight.

I was lucky enough to see a bunch of Hurricanes games during their Stanley Cup run. I missed all of game 2 and the first 2 periods of game 7, but at least I got to see the last 16 minutes of the final game. Both game 2 and game 7 fell on work days for me. For game 7, I just snuck away for a little while to catch the end. Congrats to all those guys!

We've just made the two worst drives of the whole tour, back-to-back. Monday night past (19th, following the Canes game 7) we did a 920-miler from Phoenix to Denver. Left around midnight, arrived at our hotel around 4pm the next afternoon.

I was sooo ready to kill some people on my bus by the time we got there. There's a bunch of dumbasses on my bus who are way too LOUD, and obnoxious, and they wanna dominate the TV viewing. Wouldn't be so bad, but all they want to watch is really bad, dumb movies. Their slogan is "We're crazy for Swayze", as in Patrick. Seriously, they've watched RoadHouse like 6 times in the last 2 weeks. And yes, it's the women. There's gonna be a man-revolt if this crap keeps up.

Anyway, I stayed up front with the driver the whole way. Only way to do it.

The other bad drive was Denver to San Antonio, which was like 1060 miles. Left around 12:30am Thursday night and finally got to the hotel Friday night around 8pm. I had the shotgun seat from 7:30am until we got there.

Again, I wanted to throttle some idiots. I literally dumped my bags into my room, jammed the AC to "freeze", and headed out the door. Our hotel was right on the San Antonio Riverwalk, which is kinda like Glenwood South multiplied by a factor of 10 or so. People were e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e!

I wandered around for a while, trying to decide if I wanted a couple of beers, or just a bite before heading back to the room for the night. Every restaurant was packed. As I was walking down some street, I heard a Bad Company song blasting up from a downstairs place called The Basement Bar. I stopped to see what they were gonna play next. Boston. OK, maybe I've found my place. Next up was Ray Charles. That's it, this is my place. It was dark, cold and cheap. Bud's were $2.00, tonight's special. Great!

Around 10:30, some dude came in and started setting up a DJ area in one corner. I asked the bartender what kind of music he was gonna play. He told me the guy plays everything.

Well, "everything" turned out to be a bunch of hip-hop garbage, starting with Eminem. I put up with about 5 songs, then had to bail out. What a buzz kill.

Grabbed some chow on the way back to the hotel and called it a night. Those were the first beers I'd had in over 2 weeks. It's good to be back in the game.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Try reverse psychology. Insist upon "Dirty Dancing" relentlessly.