Pinot Tour blog #1

The tour has gotten off to a pretty crazy start. We stayed an extra day in Los Angeles to watch the Lakers win the national championships. G and I went downtown that night and got wild in the streets with everyone else. I'll post some pictures and videos soon..

In Las Vegas, we noticed that there was something wrong with the van. We pulled over and called the rental place and it turns out that our "turbo" is failing. So, any time we pull over, we have to restart the vehicle and then it restarts the turbo.

Our first stop was in Beaver, UT to camp for the night. We rolled into this campsite and that's when I realized that I had forgotten an essential item for the tour: my air mattress.. DAMN! I ended up sleeping in the van and everyone else slept outside on the ground without tents. I think they got some bug bites..

On Saturday, we were traveling from Beaver, UT to Denver, CO on the 70 freeway, when out of the corner of my eye I see this motorcycle come up next to us.. we're in the left lane, he's in the right lane.. then he takes both hands off and pulls down his t-shirt. Then, he looks back and puts one hand on his handle bars and turns back to signal to his buddy. The other motorcycle must have been coming too fast up towards his buddy, because all of the sudden, the second motorcycle runs into the back of the lead bike and crashes.. right next to our van, and his bike skids across the highway right in front of us. Patrick was driving and he slammed on the brakes. We pulled off on an exit and called 911. Man, that was a close call!!

So anyway, we just made it to Denver at the last minute for load-in and soundcheck at Quixote's and played a show there. It was pretty crazy, we met this band called Antioquia who we are randomly playing a show with in Chicago at Reggie's Music Joint.

We're in Denver, CO right now, just about to leave for Lincoln, NE. We aren't playing a show there, just staying with a friend. After that, we're driving to Minneapolis, MN for a recording session with our sound engineer, Troy Watson, at IPR.

I'll have another update on here in a couple days and will try to post some pictures and videos when we get to our next stop.

In the meantime, follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pinot

-Sam