We had a good stay in Wawa (I just like saying Wawa) and it wasn’t a terribly long drive to Thunder Bay. We saw two moose and a mama bear with two cubs (from the car, thankfully). Tonight we had Jean-Paul De Roover opening for us. He also does looping, but mixes in a bunch of different sources, like percussion and voice, to give more of a one-man band effect; he uses slow builds to create big wide happy songs.

I can’t get over how good the sound is at the Apollo. We’ve played a lot of different places now on this tour, and it was really a joy to play the Apollo again. I also think there was a noticeable difference in our playing between our May show and our June show - we’ve gotten a lot of gigs under our belt in a short time, and I think we’re playing tighter and are better at adapting to situations. Todd had some technical difficulties with his mixer, so Marcus started a funny little improvisation and I joined in, and we kept that going for a bit until we could get rolling on the set again.

An Australian alt-country band called The Re-Mains were hanging out, having just arrived in town for their show the next night. We had a good chat with them after our show; they’re on a 50-date, 14-week cross-Canadian tour and by the sound of it, they will most likely be coming to a town near you.

We slept at the band space over the Apollo again. Seriously, did I mention how great it is to have this sort of all-in-one experience? Unfortunately I only got about three hours of sleep because of some kind of seasonal allergies that kept my sinuses all stuffed up, so I was a total zombie. I spent most of the drive to Winnipeg in a sort of miserable groggy state occasionally catching some shallow nap time. It rained heavily. My blackfly bites itched. It wasn’t my favourite day. And we didn’t manage to replace our Winnipeg show. But Todd and I had dinner with a fan/friend in Winnipeg, which was pretty cool, and looked around the city a bit, and I got to sleep early and am all rested again now.

Today… today is Thursday, right? First we thought we’d go to Regina. Then we thought we’d go a little past Regina, because Marcus wants to get the car tuned in the morning. So we thought maybe we’d head for Swift Current. Once we got to Swift Current we just kind of… kept going. We thought we’d stop a little while before Medicine Hat, and we even stopped into two really tiny towns that claimed to have motels - Tompkins, SK, and the unfortunately named Piapot. It took about 30 seconds to drive around the town and we didn’t have a lot of confidence in the lodging, so we kept going, past Maple Creek, and eventually it didn’t make any sense not to go to Medicine Hat. This, by the way, meant we’d been on the road for about 12 hours, and by the end of it we were starting to get a bit silly. We got lazy about our no-chain policy and checked in to the Comfort Inn because it advertised a hot tub, but it looks like it hasn’t seen a good scrub in a disturbingly long time so it wasn’t that pleasant in there. We’ve ordered a pizza and are chilling out and I’m catching up on all the internettage that I’ve been missing. Northern Ontario and Saskatchewan are not the best places for internet access, as you can see:

It’ll be a nice short drive to Calgary tomorrow. Only two more shows to go… boggles my mind.

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