Touring

This was a long tour, and it's nice to be home. Touring in general has become something I don't think much about doing, since I've been on...close to 30 of them so far? I figured today's post would be a good time to talk a little bit about tour, what goes into getting us to a venue and what we do aside from just play on stage.

Prep

We air freight our equipment, so several days before we fly ourselves out, we load up all the equipment in road cases (about 24 now) and have it picked up. If we're lucky, we can go FedEx, but that's pretty uncommon. When we get to look at the boxes upon arrival, we usually find at least one "battle wound" from a forklift or halberd or whatever the hell they do to our boxes.

Travel

We usually leave around 6am to fly out (I know, jealous yet?) but get in to the hotel early-to-mid afternoon and rest. Things like the number of transfers or layovers varies. Once we've flown in, we rent a Budget truck for the gear and two vehicles for the crew. Because the longer tours are harder for people to do the entire length, we'll switch out 1-3 people who can't stay the entire trip.

Between venues, we drive. A lot. It can take anywhere from two hours to two days to get to the next stop, and we rotate the driving/shotgun/resting duties.

Hotels

There's a lot of variables here. We could be in a budget hotel that's a 30-minute drive from the theater, a luxury hotel that's a 5-minute walk from the theater, or any sort of combination. Sometimes we get lucky and are in a great part of town for eating/shopping/sights, but other times we're in a business district and everything closes at 6pm.

I've also noticed that the nicer the hotel, the less they give you. Free internet, refrigerators and microwaves are much more likely at the cheaper places, go figure!

Theater

The theaters are truly a hit-or-miss deal. We could be in a high school auditorium or a 2500-seat brand new venue. We might have a crew of well-seasoned union workers or confused high school students. Seasoned doesn't necessarily equal professional, mind you. Still, we always try to make the crew's job easier by being self-sufficient as much as possible and cleaning up after ourselves.

School Shows

We play usually no more than two school shows for each concert, but sometimes we'll have none at all. Obviously it's best for us if the school show precedes the concert, but we don't have control over that.

It's an hour-long interactive show with audience participation. We'll bring two groups of kids up on stage, which can be daunting for the younger kids. We've had kids turn around to face the audience and freeze, cry, and even leave! Poor kids. To end, we take some Q&A time with the audience, and this is where things get interesting. 90% of the time, the questions are familiar, "what are those things on your head?" or "how long have you been playing?" But some questions are outliers, either very unusual or very insightful. Here are some:

"Who is this theater named for?" (We have NO idea.)
"Are you all related?" (Yes.)
"I have a dog!" (Uh...ok?)

You get the idea. Generally we just have to go with the flow!

Miscellaneous

People say that they gain weight on tour, because we're eating out regularly and we're usually hungry when we do so (like after a long drive, after a show, etc.) There's always a ton of snacks both brought and purchased along the way by just about everyone. My metabolism just burns it all like a freaking furnace, but I have to eat a lot more overall!

You'd think all the shows would keep us "in shape", but most people will try to get in some time at the fitness centers. Lots of driving and eating and waiting around take far more time than performing, and all of us get antsy when we're not doing something for long periods of time.

Apparently, I'm not as tall as I look on stage, it's that all the others are short. (Based on an actual comment after the show!)

We scurry around in the wings during the show like a duck's feet underwater. You only get to see the duck. :)

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So that's a tour in a nutshell, more or less. Every stage is different, every audience unpredictable. It's a lot of fun to do or we wouldn't do it, but it does take a LOT of energy to do it over several weeks. The next tour for the group is in Hawaii come June, but my next tour will be a trip to the UK in July. I can't wait!