West Coast Tour - SUVs and coffee machines....

So, this is a little belated, but I figured I'd do a little entry on my West Coast Tour too, since I did one for the East Coast :)

So me and my friend and singer-songwriter buddy Aruna headed up the coast of California on the last week of April 2005 to do our very first tour together. It was a lovely experience and one we hope to repeat again sometime later in the year.

I love driving and Aruna hates it, so I was the designated driver and Aruna was the designated navigator. We rented this huge white Ford Explorer, and I don't usually like the idea of driving SUVs, but I must say that I understand, now, why people like their SUVs. It's really nice being head and shoulders above the rest of the pack. I felt like a giant on the road among the rest of the cars. My car is a VW golf hatchback, so driving this SUV felt like driving a bus! However, it was a good thing we got an SUV or we could not have fit in all our equipment.

Between the two of us, we had two 88-key weighted keyboards, 2 keyboard stands, 2 large suitcases, boxes of cds, and various other bits and pieces. Whew....

So off we went......

[25th April - Kava Lounge (Santa Barbara)]
Aruna got happy on two cups of Kava. I had a sip of it. Made my tongue numb and
tasted pretty bitter. It's supposed to be a nice herbal relaxant of a drink, but I prefer my Darjeeling tea, thank you very much :)

[26th April - 2 Dogs Coffee (San Luis Obispo)]
We stayed in Morro Bay that evening after the performance. I had a lovely time walking along the bay, in the drizzly morning....


[27th April - Coho Coffeehouse @ Stanford]
It was great to see my friends Adrian and Nicole again and their 3 year old son Ian, whom I serenaded with "If I kissed you" :)

[28th April - The Cannery (San Francisco)
A lovely day for an outdoor concert and the acoustics were great. We had frozen fingers at the end of the gig though, because of all that wind blowing in from the bay!

[29th April - Barefoot Espresso (Santa Clara)]
We met Alissa who drove 3 hours from Sacramento to see us. Hugs also to Phillip who found us via Ping. thanks Ping! All in all, a lovely coffeehouse with great acoustics and a really fun crowd to sing for.

[30th April - Railroad Cafe and Gallery (San Luis Obispo)]


All in all, we had a wonderful tour, met some really cool people, built up some serious muscles lugging all that heavy equipment and clocked up a lot of mileage.

And it was good having a friend along for the ride. Thanks Aruna :)

East Coast Tour

I love the East Coast. Just something about those brick terracotta buildings....and perhaps the fact that you can find a dunkin donuts on every street corner in New York and Massachusetts.
I remember buying a tea with milk and sugar with a donut almost every morning from the Dunkin Donuts across the street from the Berklee College of Music when I was studying there.

So it was nice to taste the familiar again.
And Manhattan has such an energy to it. That juxtaposition of cultures, waiting around every street corner, there for the discovery. I wandered around Union Square, enthralled by the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, had a sample of the eclectic stores in St. Mark's Place (wooden crafts, tibetan beads, you name it...), rode the subway, marvelling at the stoic persistance of buskers in the steamy heat of the underground.....dragged my heavy-*** keyboard through the wet, streets of Chinatown and up and down subway steps (thanks Chris for helping out!).......
bought a pair of $5 sunglasses from a street vendor, experienced getting my eyebrows threaded for the first time (No tweezers...just a piece of string and dexterity...and presto...your eyebrows get shaped and neatened...don't know how the woman did it!...seems like it's practiced mostly by Indian women.)

Next stop after Manhattan was Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I played at my very first Campfire Festival at the lovely Club Passim. What a great community of songwriters and I love college towns. It was nice to smell the air and be in Massachusetts again. I didn't manage to head down to Boston though (not enough time in the itinerary) and that was a pity. I guess I'll just have to head back there again sometime soon and take that walk down to the Charles River and just watch the river flow by.

I was also in Rhode Island and stayed in a lovely Bed and breakfast. Loved the french toast that we had for breakfast and also met a lovely gentleman from Spain who turned out to be a writer who authored books on socio-bio-diversity. According to him, Ecuador is the country with the greatest biodiversity within the smallest land area. Fascinating.
Had a good time performing at the Tazza Caffe in Providence, R.I with my good friend and fellow singer-songwriter Zachary Provost.

After Rhode Island, we drove 7 and a half hours the next day, to get to Washington, D.C.
What a loooong drive it was.....I was all optimistic that it would be an o.k drive, but really, next time, I'm gonna study my map before I book venues that far apart *grin*

We met Janelle out at the venue, Staccato, in Washington, D.C. She had driven 5 hours from Pennsylvania to see us. Wow. And she had to drive back after our show to get the car back to Pennsylvania by the morning. I think she mentioned that she was loading up on coffee!

After Washington, D.C, we had to return to NYC the next day. What was supposed to be a 4-5 our drive turned out to be a 7 hour drive with all the bad traffic and bad weather.

The Encore performance in the Broadway district of Manhattan was fun. Michael the sound guy did a great job with the lights and sound system and I had such a lovely time playing the REAL piano!
It was also lovely to see friends like Sophia and Phillip again and their family.

Whew.... so I'm back in L.A now. Gotta go get ready for my performance tonight at The Mint.