We were warmly greeted by Sheila and Alex at the Apollo in Thunder Bay and provided with homemade veggie burgers and fries. I love going to the Apollo. It’s like a little haven for travelling bands - food and lodging provided, a terrific stage with great sound. If only it was in a better part of town - the immediate area is dismal and there’s not much in the way of pedestrian traffic, so it’s almost like it exists for the bands alone, a magical pocket of music in an otherwise grey and silent street.

Shows start late at the Apollo, so we had a lot of time to kick back. Marcus was sitting talking with Sheila outside the bar when a car pulled up and the occupants rolled down their window and looked around. Thinking they needed directions, he went to talk to them. They turned out to be Jehovah’s Witnesses, starting off their spiel with “Just hanging around in front of the bar, are ya?” Their attempts to convert, save or otherwise redeem Marcus’s soul met with failure after a few minutes of debate, and they drove off in disgust.

We met James Lamb and Miss Emily Brown, who are in the middle of a move from Vancouver to Montreal and playing shows along the way. She has a gorgeous voice, and together they played an acoustic set of soft, contemplative folk-inspired songs that was so soft and lonely and beautiful that I truly had to fight off tears. I bought her CD and am waiting for the right moody moment to listen to it.

After Emily and James finished, we played a low-key set without incident. Marcus had the bar put the lights on low, and it was quiet and mellow on a Sunday evening, and none of us felt chatty or funny.

Women followed us. I am highly amused by the fact that they are named Women. I had to go up and ask “Which one of you Women is the bass player?” I’m sure they’re sick of the jokes, but at the same time, they brought it on themselves by naming their band Women. They’re a sort of lo-fi art-pop, influenced by Sonic Youth, with a sound reminiscent of Velvet Underground combined with early Pink Floyd.

The evening ended on a few sombre notes. As we were packing up, a guy came up to the bar with blood all over his face and clothes, saying that a couple of guys had jumped him in the alleyway nearby. Sheila and Alex called 911, and police and an ambulance showed up. I’m not sure how it all ended up, or if there may have been a little more to the story than the fellow let on.

Also, we had learned early in the day that on the weekend, the Vancouver band The Hotel Lobbyists rolled their van into a ditch somewhere around Manitoba, and their drummer, Mike Gurr, was killed. Two of the other members were badly hurt as well. We ended the evening talking about their accident. We don’t know them personally, but know a few people who are friends with them, and it’s a sobering and unnerving reality that hits pretty close to home: they played The Apollo just five days before us. We’d like to send out all our sympathies & best wishes to the Lobbyists and their friends and families.

Winnipeg looked dangerously like it was going to be a wash. We got to the Cavern to find that the local pop-rock band set to open for us had cancelled (first one of the tour! Will the trend continue again?) Instead, we would be following two young local punk bands and not going on until 1 AM. We wondered quietly whether it would even be worth bothering, but we’re not ones to bail, and we figured we’d just stick it out and see what happened.

I needed to find some wi-fi, and there was none in the Cavern, which is down a steep flight of stairs underneath the Toad in the Hole Pub in Winnipeg’s Osborne Village. So I didn’t see too much of the two punk bands, whose names were “Untalented” and “The Savants". I did catch the beginning of one set and the end of the other, and I can tell you that there was much loudness and shouting and jumping. The crowd was pretty thick and punklike and increasingly inebriated. We sat in the van for a while, quietly trying to gauge what sort of a reaction we were going to get from a roomful of drunk punks. Possibly some of them would be into other styles of music and would appreciate us. Others might get pissed at our mellowness and start throwing things. I suggested that Marcus open solo with “Launching Pad” and maybe the angriest ones would just fall asleep. We settled on playing the most uptempo songs first and seeing what happened.

As it turned out, the punkiest of the punks had dispersed by the time we got on, and it was a different mix of people. While it wasn’t our typical crowd, they were extremely receptive. The only real problem was some kid from the first band, who was so drunk he could barely even walk, and got into the habit of staggering through the back door to hang out with his buddies in the alley, then bursting through the other door behind us and lurching across the stage to meet up with his buddies at the show. I had visions of him falling through the door and launching himself right into Todd’s kit and taking everything down, so I took off to lock the door so he couldn’t get through that way, at which point he fell into a chair and occasionally shouted “Play some f@#$% Springsteen!” until his girlfriend sat beside him and they made out for the rest of the show.

The upshot of the night, though, was that most of the kids were really great, everybody seemed to enjoy the night, and they were very cool to us. We told them we’re coming back on October 18 and they were pretty excited about us coming back. The manager/soundman, James Brown (no, seriously), shook his head afterwards and laughed and said “You won ‘em over". It all worked out just grand.

But what a contrast over the past few nights - we went from a downtempo lounge to a busy Irish pub to a basement full of punks? And made them happy in all three places? Never say we’re not versatile.

I’m very sorry I didn’t take pictures though. I totally forgot, two days in a row. I’ll try to do better from here on in.

Right now we’re nearing Thunder Bay and I’m listening to the two guys in a heated debate over the relative merits of heavy metal vs. jazz. We’re playing tonight with James Lamb, another Vancouver local, and Women, a band from Calgary with no women in it. Then we’ve just got a few days of driving until we hit TO.

We’ve been writing up our travels as we go, and you can come along by visiting http://www.projectarctic.com/tourblog …

I keep being amazed by the difference in the venues and crowds at each location. Regina’s show was at O’Hanlon’s, a straight-up Irish pub. It’s a pretty big place, with an upstairs balcony; they play U2 and Van Morrison over the speakers while they serve typical Irish pub fare (I had bangers & mash, in honour of the Radiohead song named after the meal). And the place fills up pretty nicely with Friday-night drinkers and carousers.

Lorrie Matheson started the night - he’s a Dylan-esque singer-songwriter from Calgary. Really interesting lyrics and he does looping as well. And he has the exact same kind of merch case that we do. Great minds think alike.

Unlike last night in Medicine Hat, which was more of a downtempo lounge environment, this looked like it called for something a bit more danceable. Marcus managed to persuade the crowd to stop lurking along the sides of the room and come stand near us, and we kicked into a good version of “You Coming Down” and got the momentum going… except that something on Todd’s snare drum broke during the song. He rushed off to fix it after we finished, and Marcus filled the space by playing “Launching Pad” solo - not part of the plan for the night, especially since it’s very, very mellow, but a good save. After that things went more or less according to plan. There were a few full-on happy drunken dancers who were fun to watch. We finished on “Anything More” and a bunch of people shouted for more, which is always nice, so we did our extended dance remix of “You Coming Down” to make up for the lack of snare the first time, and people seemed to get into that. Some towns are dancin’ towns and some towns aren’t. Vancouver isn’t. Regina is.

Over the course of the night I heard or saw about five or six glasses smash. While we were playing I saw one guy drop his second glass of the evening, and it looked deliberate - he just reached his arm out and loosened his fingers and CRASH. Later I saw him with a third glass, but he went back and set it on a table. I wonder why O’Hanlon’s doesn’t switch to plastic.

We wanted to stay at our happy little Sunshine Motel in Indian Head where we ended up by chance on the last trip, but we phoned ahead and to our shock and amazement it was booked up. I guess it does only have four rooms. We stayed at someplace called Travel Inn, one of a few independents in the main drag of hotels, and it was good but forgettable. We did stop at the Craft-Tea Elevator House again (right next to the Sunshine) for brunch today, though.

Just crossing the Manitoba border now as I write this. Today is a long drive - about 7 hours - and tomorrow will be even longer, about 9. Anyone have any suggestions for good exercises to do when you’re stuck in a car all day?

The Ottoman Lounge in Medicine Hat is a surprise. It’s a pretty sophisticated and classy little lounge with stylish dark seats and red lighting, and the highlight of the venue is a fantastic curved stage with a colourful light-up disco floor and back wall. Apparently it was a strip club in its previous incarnation. You can see where a pole used to be mounted in the wall, but that’s the only other evidence, and considering that anyone spinning on the pole would end up doing a faceplant into a large pillar, I suspect there have been some modifications to the venue since that time.

A TV plays trippy visualizations along with the lounge music. I tossed our ARCTIC banner over top just to see what it would look like, and the results were so cool that I now want to carry a huge flatcreen TV with us everywhere:

It was a major contrast from the night before in Canmore where we found ourselves watching Ultimate Fighting on their TV from the stage as we played.

For some reason Marcus was on a comedic roll. This had started earlier in the day, when he reduced a bank teller to tears when she asked if he wanted his cash in big bills, and he said, “Yes, but not so big they won’t fit in my wallet.” During the show he entertained the crowd with a story of running a truck into an igloo, and tried to convince a table of girls to start their own band. He also held a raffle in which he asked if anyone in the audience already had a raffle ticket for something. One fellow brought up a raffle ticket for a local charity benefit. Marcus read through the list of potential prizes ("A new Saturn? Cool, but you ain’t getting that from us. $500 cash? Pfff - we’re musicians") and awarded him an ARCTIC t-shirt just for having the ticket.

Once again tonight it was just us on the bill, and we played two longish sets with some improvisations. I loved playing on that disco stage. We had a great night and hung around for quite a while afterwards talking to people. I think just about everybody there signed up to the mailing list and bought at least one or two CDs. I’m actually going to have to make more t-shirts once we get to Ontario, as we’re going to run dangerously low at this rate.

We stayed a few blocks away at the Medicine Hat Inn, which unfortunately didn’t nearly match the Ottoman for style and class, but was good enough to get us through the night for the drive to Regina. This is a fairly dull drive and I have spent a large portion of it napping.