A Lull – 1st ROAD BLOG from their “Winter Tour 2012” With Deleted Scenes

A Lull is on their 2012 Winter Tour with Deleted Scenes.While on the road they will be writing periodic blogs for us. The first one can be read after the break.

Everyone knows what usually happens with most parts of most tours. Drive, eat, drink, play, drive, eat, drink, play, drive, repeat in some sort of the same order. That always happens and the shows are basically, more or less, always the same. But, what happens between those recurring events, the stuff that happens that may never happen again, are the events that stick with you forever.

The first few days were pretty same old, same old with only a few flare-ups. Drive through wind and snow leaving Chicago, slide off of the road and into a ditch, cheat death, addicted to Big Macs, Lawrence, Replay Lounge, drive through the night, okay weather, Denver, Bears tattoo in a Tebow shop, Chicago peeps in Denver, boo whoop, Hi Dive, drive through the night again, no sleep till some other time, more wind, more ice, SLC, not many punks, oil change, NFL playoffs, 49ers, Patriots, Kilby Court, drum dude, peace core in Sub-Sahara Africa, Juniors, year-end best-of lists, half beers, walk-through drive-through denial, Double Double, animal style, more driving, Idaho Falls, BW3s, dude on hyped up on Four Loko steals a van and throws Four Loko, more NFL playoffs, Ravens, Giants, still addicted to Big Macs, drive, more snow, getting bad, more snow, SCREETCHING HALT.

The winter weather advisories begin. We stop off of I-15 in Dillon, Montana and the best 36 hours of tour, probably ever, commences. The forecast is bleak and the drive for the next day looks sketchy as hell. Snow all day and ice and black ice forecasted for the drive from Dillon to Billings. We decide to wait it out and make a decision in the morning. In the morning, the forecast looks bad and we can’t make it to Billings.

Dillon, pop. 3752, is an old-ass, railroad town with some good, ole boys who are genuinely good-ass people. They didn’t care that we weren’t from where they were from or that we had never shot an elk. They skipped our music on the juke box in favor of their music, but they were nicer than basically anyone else, anywhere. They were hospitable to a few dudes who were new to their tiny, little, western town. Over that first night and the entire next day and night, we posted up at a few of the bars in town and hung with some solid dudes. We arm wrestled and got our asses kick evey time, got our asses handed to us in ever game of pool that we played, placed and lost bets, drank honey flavored whiskey, and got to know some people whose numbers we will keep in our phones and will definitely call the next time we have a few hours to kill in southwest Montana. Good times. Good dudes.

Then the snow came. We made it to Missoula before the snow, but what came while we were at The Badlander must have been what they were always so scared of on The Game of Thrones. Before the show, heeding warnings of eight to ten feet of snow that was forecasted to fall onto the mountains that I-90 scales and descends between Missoula and Spokane, directly where we were heading the next day, we purchased chains (we have no idea how to operate something like that) for our tires and got as ready as we could for what could only be described as some serious shit. We woke up and were on the road by 11am. The snow had been falling hard and was continuing to fall even harder. We drove slowly and tried to keep calm and on the road while the visibility was, at times, reduced to what couldn’t have been more than fifty feet. In seven hours of white knuckles and greying hair in a van that seemed to be one of the only other vehicles brazen (or brave or stupid) enough to be on the road, we crept up and down snowy, icy roadways and traveled under 200 miles total.

So, here we sit at a Motel 6 in Couer d’ Alene, Idaho. The snow has stopped falling, but something nasty is currently pounding Portland, where we have to be by tomorrow afternoon. We plan on taking it slow and cautious and we’ll be thinking of being in southern California by next week, which may not come soon enough.