Today, though, my plans have been mostly thwarted. I was going to head down to Fontenelle Forest for an afternoon of hiking in the brisk fall air, but like the weatherman said, it’s much colder than I anticipated: twenty-five degrees. My girlfriend, Suzanne, had told me to bring my winter coat on this run, but I’d already overpacked and was convinced I wouldn’t need it. I’m now wearing sweatpants underneath my baggiest jeans. And although the weather alone wouldn’t have been a dealbreaker, the forest was like a seventeen-dollar car ride away and cost another eleven to enter, and dropping fifty bucks for a walk in the woods sounded neither relaxing nor economical. We’d also lost an hour overnight on our drive east from Denver, and so my viable hiking window was considerably shrunk. Instead, I opted to spend the rest of the afternoon reading and writing and tweaking my fantasy hockey roster at a nearby coffee shop. (Philip Grubauer, my only goalie due to a series of bold and ultimately reckless transactions, is now injured, and Wes nabbed Pavel Francouz, his backup, from free agency. I’m now in danger of not meeting the minimum goaltending requirements for the week, which wouldn’t necessarily impact me too much points-wise but is still pretty embarrassing and bush-league and well below the standards to which I hold the Golden Gulls.) However, while handing me my coffee, the barista told me about the cafe’s new winter hours: closing at 3:00, which gave me fifteen minutes.

Slightly dejected, I returned to the hotel. My plan had again been modified, this time with a simpler and seemingly more attainable goal: to take a shit. However, this would also prove to be difficult. I only bring this up because it’s maybe the most clear example of how life - and by life, I mean the most basic, daily routines - is so subtly compromised by tour. The timing of everything revolves around the shows, and so eating, sleeping, and all those habits that define and give structure to our days get shuffled around and shoehorned into strange, unnatural windows. You often end up eating not when you’re hungry, but merely when you have the chance. Shitting is the same thing. You can’t do it on the bus - well, you can, technically, but it’ll cost you hundreds of dollars and dangerous amounts of driver and bandmate goodwill - and because you inevitably end up snacking a ton after a show, usually around midnight or later, well, it usually ends up needing to happen shortly after you wake up. The problem with that, though, is that the venue usually isn’t open yet, and if you don’t have the luxury of a day room like we do today (which we almost never do on show days), you have to scramble and find the nearest Starbucks or whatever. But even with the day room today, it didn’t matter - Kenny, our drummer, was currently showering, and because the lobby bathroom was also in use, I spent the next twenty minutes or so riding the elevator between the two, waiting for one to become available. No idyllic ambles through the woods, no quiet afternoon at the coffee shop - this is how I was to spend my day off in Omaha. Just trying to find a place to poop.

This thwarting of plans, while endemic to all touring life, has become an overarching theme to this particular run over the past week or so. It started in Portland. We had a day off between there and the Salt Lake City gig, which you need since the drive is something like seven hundred and fifty miles long. Normally, we would depart Portland after the show, getting to Boise, the halfway point, the next morning. We’d then spend the whole day there before departing again around two in the morning to finish the drive to Salt Lake, arriving at the venue on the day of the show. However, we had to stay in Portland because of a morning radio session on the off-day, which necessitated us starting the drive to Idaho at like two in the afternoon. For the next nine hours, all seven of us (eight, including our driver, Cliff) were aboard the bus, hugging the south shore of the Columbia river heading east. It’s one of the more beautiful drives in America, and so it was nice to be able to see it in daylight, but the claustrophobia nonetheless mounted as our day off slowly evaporated outside the windows. We finally arrived, not to Boise, but to Meridian, shortly before midnight, with a nearby 24-hour diner our only available option. I got a cup of coffee (refilled thrice), scrambled eggs, a pancake, hash browns, and a slice of banana cream pie before climbing back aboard the bus.