ski tour, 2008; part one

okay. this has probably been what has caused the delay. i'm going to go for it, here.

thinking about ski tour is like - hmm, like, opening a can of worms. were there a ton of problems?mmm, no - but, it was inordinantly long, we missed home, shows were complicated in places; however, scenery was beautiful, we learned a lot, and had some fun (half glass full - if you were a bird, you'd go bonks over a can of worms).

we left for ski tour (the name given to the longest tour you can get as a member of TourCo that travels through several snowy, western states) on january 4th, i believe. we had a home show on NYDay, as well as several holiday shows on the 27th, 28th, and 29th that week too, so we were already a little spent before we traveled. still, though, we turned our holiday show over completely to a holiday-less one (for the most part), and we were psyched about the road and went for broke.

instead of a zillion posts, how about i just summarize some together and make these the longest posts in the history of time? we all on board? good, good.

january 4th & 5th-

we leave chicago at like, blip o'clock. we arrive to sc so early, mind you, that a news crew was outside getting footage for like, the 5:30am news. i think it was about the primaries and barack v. hilski. katie, chuck, and i all ended up on nbc, but didn't see it because we arrived that day in our start point, salt lake city.

salt lake was beauts. just beauts. tons of mountains, and as katie said many times, it looked like the land of something from star wars (nerds, i don't know). look how pretty the drive in was:

we flew into this town, packed up two cars and hit the road to park city, utah, the home of our first show about 2o minutes away. let's rank days by a new measurement system - won't that be fun? let's call it the tdometer (preferred pronounciation tid-ahh-meter, but tee-dee-o-meter also accepted).

tdometer for park city/salt lake city: excited

park city was cute, and we walked around and shopped and did shit like that. i fell in a snowpile within seconds of hitting town, but it felt like falling on a bed of peeps (done it). i laughed and laughed and we had lots of fun, had some good lunches, did generally fun things. look!

i was also excited because of these bullet points: on first night, bjack got a call that he was being held for a michael mann movie (great!), we knew we were close to olympic park (picabo!), and super stoked because i found out i had lots of friends from the provo, utah comedysportz coming to our SC show. super fun, super exciting. they came the second night of shows at the egyptian - ten cszers, only two i had met before. now, that's adorable. here's those jerkz with three of us:

hi micah! hi trent! hi, WCL! it made my day that all these guys came out.

we did two shows here at a lovely theatre called the egyptian, katie and i bought "snowveralls" at sportmart (a purchase i still really love and are strangely sexy). we got caught in a snowstorm driving from semi-closed olympic park (sads), so we worked back to salt lake to switch out said cars to cars with 4X4 for rest of trip. boing!

january 6th and 7th, travel days.

the 7th marked the BCS game between osu and lsu.

td-ometer: wet cat

january 8th - Gillette "the best a man can get", Wyoming.

td-ometer: still doing lovely/chipper as fuck, i guess

our first venture into wyoming. to be honest? i don't remember shit about this venue. we realized something about this trip early on - too many days off are killer. the 6th and 7th made us anxious for more shows, as idle hands are the devil's work. the days off consisted of a lot of car talks and naps, indigo girls interpretive dancing (pictured below),

and reading the shit out of usa today and horrible rags - say, Stars ARE just like us!

man, what happened in gillette? oh! i know what this place was. the show was fun, all was well. i only remember the green room here and not really the stage, so - i blew it there. i do remember meeting a really nice local waitress at applebee's (i said it) who gave us free junk after my horrible ride of the BCS gamewatch. she came to the gillette show with some comps we gave her and her husband. she was lovely, and had just moved to gillette, so was really eager for activity.

this performance night marks the first night of cast discontent, one initiated by a few parties wanting to do seperate things with our days off. luckily, it was figured out, and we decided to all take a long, long day trip to mt. rushmore in south dakota the next day. see?

i'm really glad we went, if only for the bit.

this was january 9th. i drove this whole day to south dakota from wyoming, and honestly, i'm not sure why i did. we swap driving here and there and teal is great about it, but today including all activities i drove a solid ten hours. we laughed a lot at mt. rii, and i decided here to begin getting a patch for every state we touched in tourco. i still like this idea.

td-ometer: driving to kill the pain, but generally still together

later, we rounded back to devil's tower, site of close encounters. the girls and i rode into the park at dark, and this may mark one of the most ridiculously scary moments that isn't that scary in my life. it felt like a slumber party; for instance, when we rounded the corner and saw the tower far off in the sunset for the first time, we all screamed.

td-ometer: scared shitless, but still braver than most those fux

we wanted to learn as much as we could but no one would move. i honked the horn of the car for warnings - like bear chimes in my head - and ran out of the car to read the sign aloud to the car. essentially, it was like - this is a holy ground for native americans, paranormal activity is thought to have happened here, blahblahblah and oh - watch out for rattlesnakes, ya dipshit.
and ooooOOOOooooo!, that's where i'll leave you for this afternoon. more coming tonight.

this is going well.