A long time gone

It seeems that keeping up with this blog has escaped me in the last couple weeks. :) As we keep telling everyone we visit--we're on a whirlwind tour. It's been wonderful, but I've been busier hanging with people and taking in what's around me than I would have realized. So, needless to say, I find myself already in Florida and looking back at my last post from Portland, OR.

Where have we been since then? We took a sunny and misty tour down Oregon's coast on Hwy 101 before arriving in California's Redwoods. California's mountains, cities and coast welcomed us, and our many friends and family in CA were happy to see that our truck had safely carried us all the way out there to see them. Visiting California is a rewarding goal on its own, but for us, meeting up with new and old friends was an essential part of our time there. Nate had not met many of his dad's brothers and sisters before this trip and was happy to discover that many of his cousins have that same curious drive towards playing music, just like himself. We were able to visit four of the five Butler siblings that live in California; each visit left us feeling blessed and excited to finally meet the larger extensions of Nate's family.

Between the cable cars in San Francisco and Sunset Blvd in Hollywood, we also managed to get an introduction to California's famous cities although both of us ended up feeling like we could have spent more time in both. Besides the Butler family, we were hosted by the Metz family in northern California and Nick and Margie in Reedley, CA. We met Jenny M for breakfast, and met up with Nate's old tour mate Ryan Hahn in West Hollywood who treated us to a quick inside look at the Roxy on Sunset Strip ... thanks so much for taking time to connect with us guys, especially since we had such little time.

Nate's continued picking up tracks from friends on the song he's working on, besides the tracks from Ben Metz and Christian Groves, Nick McIntyre added vocals and Ryan Hahn contributed a tasty guitar lead. I know he hopes to add a few more in Charlottesville in the next week.

We left Los Angeles last Tuesday noon after getting our brakes freshened up by Nate's cousin Bill who owns an automotive shop in Montrose, CA. We were sent on our way across the Mojave with plenty of water and invitations to return anytime. Turning our noses east was also an internal turning point... we knew we only had a little over a week left in our journey. The driving time has been ramped up a bit this week as we arrived in Texas's panhandle late Wednesday evening at my uncle Randy's house. We got the full tour of their new-to-us home and the great art they've taken to collecting. They're just about done with that as their walls are full and their second daughter plans on marrying this January... but Randy was still scheming on how to rearrange in order to hang a few more pieces in the dining room...

We spent Thursday day with them in Plainview before heading down to Lubbock with my cousin Jennifer and her son Ethan in order to eat dinner with Frank, where we spent the night. We had a slow Friday morning, making great friends with Ethan before hitting the road once more with a long haul through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama before we hit Florida and made our way down to Bradenton where Nate's Grandma Bitting lives. I'm writing on pirated internet from their dining room table this afternoon. We stopped in Tampa last night and showed up at their door early enough to go to church with them this morning.

In the midst of all our travel and busyness.. we've come to a sense of where we want to be next. After listening to us tell our story, Nate's uncle Martin Tom paused and then said, "So you're going to Chicago." At first we tried to protest, that is not what we had meant to say--but then listened to ourselves and realized that essentially, it was.

Coming closer to home, exploring the opportunities afforded by a larger city, learning something we haven't managed to yet.. these are our hopes as we approach Chicago. In the weeks ahead we'll be gathering our belongings and hovering in Indiana while we look for work up by the lake in Illinois. Wednesday you'll find us back in Charlottesville, trying to say our good byes to something I'd rather wasn't ending, yet am not comfortable with staying the same. Perhaps "so long" is better than good bye...

A few days in Portland

We arrived in Portland Thursday night to spend a few days with my five-years-older uncle Jamie who I've been eager to visit since he moved here several years ago. We've been taking in the town in small spurts but also holed up at home enjoying the rhythm of staying in one place, a rest. Jamie is in the middle of transition as well so our conversations have often returned to that revolving (and at times relentless) subject.. what is it we are doing next with our lives?

This morning we ate a scrumptious breakfast at Jam on Hawthorne before helping to load extraneous furniture to Jamie's new home. The evening came quickly and is slowly spooling out its last strands.. accompanied by rolling chords under Jamie's piano hands. Talk about long-time memories--he used to have all the cousins dancing round the living room.

Tomorrow will bring us Hwy 101, the coast and eventually, California. As Matthew said today, "You can't go much further than that."

The middle of nowhere

This week we ran across a town in Nebraska that truly advertises itself as the middle of nowhere and the roads we have been traversing certainly seem to live up to that adage; the landscape vast and desolate, varied plains and craggy mountains, sage brush crouching close to the ground. Gnarled trees reach for glory. We hit the road riding hard--the rolling hills of Nebraska gave way to South Dakota's forested Black Hills. We spent a night among the pines before heading out across Wyoming to Yellowstone. A few miles outside of Cody, Wyoming we camped on the side of a mountain rimmed reservoir with starry heavens above us and the water lapping against a stony shore. I can't quite explain the beauty of the place.

To jump back a few days, last Friday we were able to go to my cousin Jeb's first game of the high school football season in Iowa. The excitement was palpable, the energy almost visible. The game went on, tied from the first quarter to the last when Jeb's team scored once more and that rumbling energy erupted into thunderous joy. It's been awhile since I've been around school culture and ironically for me, it was a lot of fun, fun being with people who had something to get excited about but weren't uptight about it either. And to my aunt Joani's relief, skinny tall Jeb finished with all of his limbs intact--albeit sore from holding off guys significantly larger in size.

After Joani and I chatted about how there was something so quintessentially "all-American" about that evening I wanted to include something of that evening here. Even as I say that, it brings to mind how America is always expanding and my definitions and experiences of it expand as well. I have the farm high school culture of the Midwest on one side and the vast unpopulated expanses of southern Idaho on the other...home of elegantly frozen volcanic fields and dropping grounds for nuclear waste. Not in my typical descriptions of American countryside. And I'm headed further west... the city cultures of Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles await us. Even today, we pulled out of the wilderness and ventured downtown to the evenly laid city blocks of Boise, Idaho. Coffeehouses are a second home everywhere.

further down the road

Hello from sunny Minneapolis! What struck me the most when we rose over the edge of earth that gave us our first view of downtown is that it was a city with many trees.. with the spires of skyscrapers rising from its center. We're here with Christian Groves and his family; Nate pulled all the music gear out from the bowels of the truck for the second time this week and is tracking a bass line this morning on a demo track he started with Ben Metz on Wednesday in Waterloo, IA before Ben headed out to GDI's Fusion weekend (hello to all there in Warm Springs, VA, we'd love to be there with you!).

Earlier this week we were in Washington County, IA, staying on my grandparents farm, the place of \many sunsoaked hours of freedom in my childhood. It was gorgeous as ever.. perhaps more so.

I'm enjoying documenting the details of what we encounter along the way, they're all adding up to some kind of patchwork Americana... the hard brick corners and turns of the urban streetscape co-inside as a contour line against the curve of horizon reaching out from both sides of a rural highway.

I always start at the beginning

From a second floor brown bedroom on south Sixth Street in Goshen, IN: We arrived Tuesday evening after a late night escape from Charlottesville through the wind-roaring rain all the way into Cleveland. Spent several hours in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an ironic record of both raging passions and packaged soul. The last few days have been a slow unwinding; visiting old-time friends and sticking up a finger to test the wind. We'll be rolling out the door come Monday morning, spending time in Chicago, Iowa and Minneapolis this coming week. Join us as you like, we'll be leaving notes along the way.