There

Day One.
by Cheryl
Never went to bed, so day one feels like a continuance of the rest of my life, but let us just pretend it started at 1 A.M. when we pulled out of Hot Springs. I left completely amazed at my ability to pack right up until the critical moment, knowing full well that we could have been ready 5 hours earlier, if I had just had to.

We get to Little Rock, saying a sad farewell to our coffee thermos, knowing that the next 45 days will be full of whatever coffee we can get, which actually means $1.75 rotgut on the Amtrak. And they even insist on putting it in a paper cup first, for you to put in your ceramic mug. Inventory.

The train was nicely on time, and I had to sign 4 passes for all 18 stops, which puts me at a total of 72 signatures to get on the train. We got a few hours of bad sleep, sitting up in our chairs. I wish they had an onboard chiropractor.

This is what Amtrak looks like at 3 A.M.

The ride, after the 7 A.M. announcement that woke everyone up, was exciting.  A whole new world to explore, running back and forth from the riding car to the viewing car.  This was a newer coach, everything was so nice and clean.  The seats were wide, and there were no fingerprints on the windows.  Side note:  No internet access in the stations.

Shockingly enough, our train was early.  I said, EARLY.  Have you ever heard of such a thing?  Imagine, us, in the Dallas Amtrak Station, “Union Station”, dazed and confused, sitting on our luggage wondering what would be next.

Zephyr thought finding his name on a sign in Texas was just right.

We stared at the wall for a while, and then made our first social move of the train tour.  Contacting Norman Seaton, the president of the National Accordion Association.  We headed over to El Centro College, where he is making COBOL logic intelligible to the PHP generation.  Norman met us, and swept us away to Miss Chicken, where we got a fried chicken lunch with Mountain Dew for the tired kids (after our night on the train, this only worked to level them out).  The kind of fried chicken that no paper napkin can touch.  The kind of fried chicken that dreams are made of.  Crunchy, greasy, plentiful:  YUM.  (Is it lunchtime?)  Norman, thankyou for lunch. (he picked up the lunch tab, which was good, because the guy behind us was about to donate to our tab looking at the state of our children and that could have gotten weird) After lunch we walked over to a western store, where like a true Texas pro, Norman breezed in and tipped his hat to the cowboys working there, who I’m sure would have preferred if we had been the kind of folks who liked to buy $500 cowboy boots, but we shamelessly took some pictures and waltzed on out of there.

I wish we had bought that hat.

They hardly minded the sticky prints on the cowboy hat from the fried chicken because he was so cute....

But not until the kids decided this was a proper shopportunity and started picking up diamond studded sunglasses and jewelry as fast as they could and asking “Mom, would you buy me this???”  While the cowboys looked on….

After we went to the cowboy store, Norman walked us over the grassy knoll, where we lost our 35th president back in ’63.  I just didn’t have the heart to go stand in the middle of the road and take a picture of it, so just imagine.  Grassy knoll.  Now the I-35 entrance ramp.  Welcome to modern living.

After this we drove over to the Mustangs of Las Colinas.  I loved that.

These things were big, no bull.

After this, I think Norman had about enough of sightseeing with two kids in tow, so he drove us to the mouth of the Dallas Underground, which was under the Bank of America building, and you KNOW how much Bank of America security guards like a bunch of feral kids running around their escalators and jumping in their water features.  By that time, we were all feeling the effects of a strange night of sleeping and the bright hot sun of Dallas, Texas.  We went in the underground, and realized right away that there are no comfortable chairs in a place intended to feed people with day jobs at lunch, so evacuated to go find a sofa somewhere.

We found the AV center at the El Centro college, where we went in this dark room with seats with a flat screen TV blaring the latest celebrity “news” and fell asleep until the sounds of the kids fighting woke us up.  We grabbed a snack from the bookstore, and Norman drove us out to Lee Harvey’s, our gig for the night.

Lee Harveys:  our gig, 6-8 or maybe 9.  Well, who is the super music dork here?  You know, when I say, I’d love to play from 6-8, I don’t actually mean 9-12!!  But I am going to learn (repeat after me) that in the new music venue world, you can actually have no idea what time things start, or what the expectations of time might be.  This night, it meant whenever they could find some AA batteries for the mic.  Really, it was no big deal, except the kids who were there all go to bed at 8, and here we are smiling nicely at our punctual friends while everything got set up.  We had some great people show up who we had met in Hot Springs, some biker chicks, some friendly friends who had hired us to crash a wedding one time, Norman, and our host, Mari and her two sweet kids:

If the kids look tired, that is because they are.

The show went well, we played a long set, halfway through the set Mari evacuated with the kids, which was so nice I don’t even know what to say.

We stayed until I couldn’t understand the slurred words anymore, and I snuck in and called a taxi.  I KNOW someone would have brought us home, but I couldn’t find anyone sober enough to ask.  That is usually a sign that the $20 a cab would cost is money well spent.

The next morning we woke up and showered, and shared a coffee with Mari and fed the kids cereal and caught the bus back to Union Station.

Goodbye, Dallas! We will be back!!