I must go down to the sea again...

For the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that cannot be denied
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying And the flung spray and the blown spume and the seagulls crying...

Our future album cover when we form that Beatles-esque type band and rattle around the US in a tour bus stopping at obscure little towns and playing in ratty old theatres.

Wait...

I saw this pile of rock and thought it would be fun to climb...

It was...

Ryan joined me because if it's seemingly impossible, crazy and dangerous with a small chance of success, Ryan is all in. How can you not love that??

Strange Left on top of the world!
The way down was a bit treacherous... But we were successful :)
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover

And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over...

(with excerpts from John Masefield's poetry)

Really REALLY big trees...

Such the understatement...Can you see the tiny car coming over the horizon in the picture above? The tiny dot on the road. yeah? That's the scale of mammoth tree we are talking about in the Redwood forest.

All of us were walking around saying "we've always heard it was big but this is GIGANTIC..."

The scale of redwood to your own person is just unimaginable until you are there looking at these ginormous trees in this, huge, still, lush forest.

The small things are just as beautiful. The whole forest floor was a damp spongy pile of decomposing ferns and cast off needles. Felt like a big mattress with the smell of cool moisture and greenery.
Tiny mushrooms...

Massive trees...Brilliant shafts of sunlight...

The perfect afternoon.

Lucy el autobus

I keep meaning to talk about Lucy our bus, the home away from home where we spend most of our time. And now that we have one more day with her, perhaps now is the time.

Jennifer was standing on the sidewalk and noticed a passer-by looking in the window of the bus. He asked her if this was her bus and then said that he had also been on tour in this same bus! Our driver used to do rock and roll tours and it turns out this guy was with the country group Diamond Rio and they had used this bus on their tour last year. Diamond Rio is currently in Portland and they came down to Medford - where we are - on one of their days off. How weird is that?

This is the front lounge complete with piles of luggage people are trying to sort through to weed out piles of crap to send home before we get on a plane for Alaska. Overweight luggage sucks...

The back lounge...

The back lounge with people in it. Spacious, right?

In the middle are sleeper bunks in 4 tiers of 3 bunks.

Here's a close up of my bunk on the top. Note the cute purse I just bought at the antique mall down the street in Medford, Oregon.

Ryan's inventive use of space... When everyone is in the bus and awake, it's really crowded. Finding space requires creativity...

The liquor cabinet stocked by our production manager when we went on the road. Being on tour will turn you into a champion drinker, but we still have SO much of this left.

Because we have played at so many college campuses, Ryan calls this the "MTV College Campus Invasion Tour of The Producers." To that end, he collects pennants from our various stops...

The devil duck and the star topppers to our radios, chillin' out in front of a huge lit up pumpkin :)

Next stop? Alaska.

Then Christmas break and a new bus when we come back.

We actually did a fair amount of sight seeing in California. My next posts will have pictures of the ocean, the redwoods and the crazy Winchester mansion...