Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'...

Damanta tries to make it from Lethbridge, Alberta to Chicago, Illinois in less than 24 hours on August 2/3rd...

We passed the spot of our second breakdown,...the first breakdown... and changed drivers right before the border. Elegwen took the wheel and even his famous charm couldn't get us through without a quick inspection. It was no problem though and we were on our way through the great state of Montana. The sun was setting and a storm was brewing up but we managed to get some killer views of the mountains before the sun went down. At a fuel stop in Great Falls (site of one of our cancelled shows) we discovered an incredibly low oil level due to a leak. Good Times in your free truck!

Everything was going well and we might have made some headway through the night but we got stopped by some police in Lewiston, Montana because apparently, our rear running lights were out. This meant that drivers behind us could not see us unless we were braking or signalling. We spent half an hour on the side of the road trying to find the problem and and another hour and a half trying to get it in a gas station changing bulbs and fuses and testing different situations. Nothing worked so we decided to run with our four ways on and continue through the night.

This was where not having the Pooka really hurt. Without the back seat to nap in the person who was ‘asleep’ had to deal with loud music or videos on the iPod to keep the driver and navigator awake. I am not really good at sleeping in a seated position anyways so you can imagine how much sleep I got packed into a truck cab with two other guys watching entourage at top volume…

At 6am on a desolate stretch of road we stopped by a country school to take pictures of the sunrise and change (tractor) drivers. I was on. At first I took it calm and got a feel for how The Beast handled but by the time we’d reached the interstate at the Montana/North Dakota border, I was ready to go plaid by making the jump to Ludicrous Speed.

I powered across North Dakota, through badlands just after sunrise and through farmers’ fields, battling the cross winds (and people from Minnesota who don’t know what the passing lane is for). I noticed that North Dakaota had an innovation with respect to letting drivers know what was coming up...While North Dakotans tell you at the base of the ramp that you have NO SERVICES at that particular ramp while in Montana you are not notified until you are at the top of the ramp and off the highway...

When we reached Bismarck, ND at noon, I figured we were on the state border (my navigator was asleep…). Wrong. We still had half a state to go and doubt began to creep into my mind as to whether we could make the show. Elegwen had assured me it was only a couple of hours from Madison, Wisconsin to Chicago so I figured we could still make it. We told Matt to get on the plane and we’d meet him there.

We reached Fargo, ND (yes that Fargo) at 3:30pm. For some reason it seemed like a good idea to get out of the car for a lunch break at Taco Bell (instead of driving through—I blame road fatigue) and skirted Minneapolis by 5pm. The road to Madison was long and it was becoming clear that we didn’t have a chance to make there for our spot at 11pm.

Outside of Madison at 9:30pm, we called Matt to give him the bad news. In his heart, he already knew. Phil, an engineer who had been scheduled to record our set that night, had offered to take him in and extended that offer to us. We were incredibly fortunate to have come across such a generous person. We stopped at another Taco Bell somewhere in Illinois and I might have been hallucinating but I swear I saw a helicopter on the back of a pickup...

We finally pulled into Phil’s driveway at 3am after a 34 hour journey. Fortunately, he still let us in. We had been stopped three times by the police about our tail lights and without these stops and attempted repairs after the stops we might have made it to the show on time. But we didn’t. It looked like we’d invested quite a bit (the cost the gas, the cost of hiring the sound engineer and the cost of Matt’s ticket to fly down and the human cost of the ordeal of getting to Chi-town) for very little gain. A somewhat depressing out come to a VERY long day.