122 miles from home

Spokane was a wonderful experience. We had the good pleasure of getting to know a lot of new people. We are exceptionally grateful to Richard, Dana, Nick and, of course, little Sammie for welcoming us to their beautiful home. You guys were the best and we look forward to seeing you again!

We rolled into town around 5pm just in time to have a nice dinner with Richard, Dana & Nick and drop off a few of our things before the show. We rolled down to Caterina Winery a little before 7pm to load in. Troy, the bartender, greeted us warmly, but explained that we may just be on our own to set up the sound for the evening. Fortunately, Matt has a pretty good background with smaller PA systems and I'm a techie at heart so we managed fine.

Matt and I still hadn't had a proper rehearsal ... well we kind of figured out what parts I would play a few days earlier, but we hadn't practiced playing together. So, we found a nice set of deck chairs outside of the winery and ran through a few tunes and built the setlist. Things sounded pretty good, so we went with that. The show was so much fun for me .. this was my first live show in about 3 years and my very first outing on banjo (I've only had the banjo for about a year and I really only started seriously learning to play it in the past few months) and we had a great time. The Triumphant Returns, an excellent band from Spokane, closed out the night with some energetic and well-constructed songs.

We really look forward to getting back up that way again.

Unfortunately, this trip may have killed Matt's trusty old Chevy. The ol' girl started to rumble and shake about 200 miles into our trip back home. Fortunately she got us safely home. Well, now I'm going to go catch Shelley Short at the Someday Lounge.