Friday, July 20th 2007 Gaylord, MI
Fun at“Alpenfest”
We left Kalamazoo at 9:30am and most of us went back to sleep on the bus. It was a beautiful day and it sounded like the gig was going to be a lot of fun as well. We pulled in about four hours later and the town of Gaylord was jumping with festival activity. The buildings and houses looking like you just stepped into Switzerland. I couldn’t resist getting off the bus and taking a stroll through all of the excitement. You could hear polka bands, smell that sweet smell of roasting almonds, and in the town square they were holding a pie-eating contest. There were quite a few cool shops up and down the street and I did end up going into one of them and getting a neat little stage hoodie to wear for the eve. I came unprepared for the temperatures that we were going to have to be playing in, (mind you, we’ve been spending the past few weeks of tour in 100 plus temperatures, so not once in our minds did we realize that we would be playing in 50 degree weather!) so I managed to find this neat little hoodie and long sleeved shirt half off the price!
Soon after, we did our sound check and we were a little bit concerned about the sound gear. Apparently, they’d had a huge storm blow through the night before and some of it had gotten wet. So it was pretty wild trying to get it going, because it seemed like every time we’d get a mix set, it would change. However, by show time, after leaving the gear on for a while, it dried out and settled in with us just fine for our mixes. We did two shows, each 45 minutes. We had a great time and there were a lot of cute little kids at the front of the stage dancing. We got to hang out with the Alpenfest queen’s court and also with some of our Navy guys. They gave us some cool Navy swag too!
We left Gaylord around 1am. We have a day off in Chicago tomorrow!