After five or six straight shows in the Northwest (and my first-ever Orange Julius! Delicious!) we piled into the Say Whenabago and pointed it toward Texas. Mark is a driving machine. He has done all but five hours of this 26-hour trek. I did the overnight driving to give him a chance to sleep.

We stopped in Oklahoma City to grab lunch/dinner, a meal that at age 6 I skillfully named “dunch.” Everybody really enjoyed Cracker Barrel, except for that we got served by a dude rather than the cute Southern girls they always have working there.

After dunch we played what may have been the finest Wiffle Ball game of the tour. Mark and I beat Zack and Maxwell 4-3. Mark provided much of the offense, hitting two home runs and several doubles. I had a bomb of my own and managed not to strike out nearly as much as I have been. Zack developed a nasty breaking ball that I nicknamed The Ukranian Gong, so named for the sound it made when it hit the metal garbage can we were using for a strike zone. Everybody pitched really well today. Mark had some crazy curveballs, Maxwell’s stuff was moving well, and I threw a nasty slider and even managed to strike Maxwell out with a hanging curve to end the game.

This really has been a great week for baseball, mainly because the Cubs AND the Yankees lost. And Boston and Denver won (we stay in Denver so much we now kind of feel like we live there.)

Mark gets MVP for the past two days. Not only is he a hell of a driver, he also changed a flat tire in Dallas today in about 30 seconds. OK it was more like 15 minutes but that was OK because everybody else seized the opportunity to get out of the van and stretch a bit and practice karate moves against one another.

This has been a long drive, but it’s almost over. That’s it, sports fans. More tomorrow, when we engage in hijinx at the New Found Glory show in Austin tomorrow with our friends in The Banner Year.

John

Found: Sense of focus.

Tough start to the day. We forgot to close the trailer door when pulling out of my parents’ driveway, then about 500 yards down the road we wondered why people were honking at us. It might have had something to do with the fact that the trailer doors were wide open and about 10 tons of musical equipment and luggage were about to fall out.

We pulled over and everything was there — except for Mike’s suitcase and mine. At first I was furious. Come on, we’re a professional band. We don’t make mistakes like this any more.

But apparently we do, and now we’re back on the road, headed for two shows in Kansas. These will be two of the best showss we’ve played in a while. That suitcase held everything I took on the road with me, save for a couple of books, my shaving kit and my Aerobed. Now all I have is my guitars, my amp, a few cables and five people to whom I have entrusted my life and musical career.

It will not be fun to wear the same shirt and jeans until I get a chance to go buy some new ones. But that’s not important. I still have what I need to go play rock music, and that’s what I am here to do.

John

Throughout the first month of this tour I have struggled at Wiffle Ball. I’ve been swinging high at low pitches, low at high pitches, and I’ve been way ahead of the curve balls. But somehow all these problems corrected themselves as soon as we began playing at Latif Grounds, also known as Maxwell’s parents’ back yard.

 I launched the first pitch into the trees. And the second. We got a proper game going and I hit four home runs in one inning.

All of this led to a good show at the Webster Theater in Hartford, then a good night on the town with several of the Latif brothers. It is impossible to have a good night on the town with all the Latif brothers, mainly because Hartford lacks a bar big enough to hold all 735 of them.

We enjoyed a delicious breakfast of falafel and grape leaves then headed back to Boston, where we are crashing with family or friends for the next few days. We’ll be booking lots of shows in the next few days, catching up with the people we left behind, then heading right back out on Tuesday for Leg 2.

Can’t wait for that to happen, but for right now it’s good to be home.

John

Dinner was ridiculous. Imagine all the food you’ve ever seen and then imagine more than that, and that’s about how much we ate. We sat around and talked, then shared a nargile with  a few of Maxwell’s brothers, watched “Rock of Love” on VH1 and then proceeded to sleep for the next 10 hours. We woke up to the smell of breakfast and ate profusely once more.

Wow, did it get cold up here in a hurry. A week ago we were swimming in the ocean in Florida. Now we’re wearing sweatshirts at high noon. It’s good to be back east, but that west coast weather sure is easy on the body.

John

The show looked and felt and sounded great, which nearly made up for the $115 parking ticket we got. We’re pretty sure they saw the Massachusetts plates and decided to mess with us; we were the only car on the block to get a ticket.

Afterward we wandered Manhattan in search of a drink and instead we wound up at this Italian festival straight out of the Godfather. All we wanted was a beer and instead the bar sat us at a table with a tablecloth and candles and stuff. We ordered appetizers strictly out of a sense of obligation.

We had one beer and some fried mozzarella and got the hell out of there. Then we had another quick one at a martini-type place near the club.

All night it felt like something was missing. That something was Matty, who has gone home to be with his family for a few days. He’s meeting us back in Boston to start the second leg of the tour.

We’re off to Hartford for a two-day retreat with Maxwell’s family. Lots of food, lots of exercise, lots of rest. Can’t wait.

There are cars everywhere and people everywhere and ambulances trying to get by us.

 We like playing New York. We hate getting to New York.

There were some girls who saw us play at Bamboozle, a big festival thing we did at Giants Stadium. There was a guy from New Mexico who we met on Warped Tour, and there was a girl who saw us in New York about a year ago. They all thought enough of us to keep checking back on our tour dates, and they saw that we were playing their town, and they came. Beautiful.

All we need is to find a few hundred thousand more people just like this and we’ll be all set.

John

Great times in Raleigh. Promoting at NC State really paid off…we brought some people to the show and the venue was impressed with our efforts. We’ll be back there, because it was a cool place full of VERY cool people. We played pretty early to a good-sized crowd, then spent the next few hours just hanging around and talking to people and telling jokes and having a great time.

 It was a good end to a rough patch of the tour. We’ve had some long drives, costly fill-ups and lean crowds, but now we’re playing some sweet shows in Pennsylvania and New York and Hartford, where we’ve played before and have already planted the seeds of what some would call a following.

It only gets better from here.

 John

Everybody’s in a pretty good mood today because we had a good show in Fayetteville last night and splurged on a $40 motel room. Sleeping in a bed that does not require inflation is a wonderful thing.

 Mother Nature trounced me.

The first 10 waves or so were great. Then I decided to get adventurous like Mark, who used to live on the Cape and knows how to bodysurf. I took on one really huge wave and caught it right as it broke. It flipped me over, I scraped my chest on the ocean floor, and the wave washed over me and flipped me on my back. My trunks got shredded, and I looked like someone had just torn my nipple ring out. (I do not have a nipple ring, and after today, I’m REALLY glad I don’t.) Matty took some pictures but trust me, you don’t want to see them.

I stuck with it for another half hour or so, and the salt water stung so bad I thought my chest was on fire. Lucky for us we have hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin, so now I’m bandaged up and feeling much better.

The rest of the guys put up a valiant fight with the waves, and while I cannot say they won, I can say they battled Mother Nature to a draw.

We’re driving through the night for two shows in North Carolina, then it’s back up to the Northeast. We’re back in Boston on Sept. 22. It will be nice to be home for a few days, but no more than that. The road has been good to us — hard, but good — and we can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.

John