5-Feb-2011: Tomcats - Fort Worth, TX

We started driving pretty early to be on time at the venue in Fort Worth. First 30 miles took something like three hours because of the icy roads, but the ice started to melt aroun 11am and we arrived to the venue after 1pm. It was really cool to load-in and set-up the merch table for a change. We are currently handling also the merch for Barren Earth because we could not take anyone on board to sell the merch for us and we offered them our services. This has never been a problem to RS and we usually end-up having a good time when we hang-out at the merchandise table. Some of you may remember the pictures from Atlanta...

Hungry guys and our driver waiting for a taxi ride to the hotel

Kristian owns this place - or at least he owned on stage later-on

Keijo getting some groceries

After the set-up we started to look for a place to eat in. We saw a cool-looking Mexican restaurant after a while, but it was on the another side of a 4-lane road with loads of traffic. Stupid Finnish people decided to run for it and fortunately everyone managed to survive from the Frogger-game. Unfortunately the restaurant was closed due to frozen water pipes and we had to cross the road again to head back into an American buffet-restaurant, which ended-up being a god choise in the end. Four stuffed Finns headed back to the venue to start the night. There was two local bands playing tonight, which is always a good thing to get the audience properly warmed-up before the tour begins. Barren Earth had an awesome set and they also had really good sounds on this show. Our show was also a good one and it felt absolutely amazing to be on stage after two days of trying. We cheering and some mosh-pitting during our set before it was time to have a small party to celebrate Oppu's birthday.

Mr. Perttilä looking evil at the merch stand

Our final destination was our mobile home, which started driving towards El Paso to have a day-off in there before heading to Tempe, Arizona. This day-off felt a bit ridiculous after these two missed days, but there was nothing we could do about that anymore when it was obviously impossible to get us booked on our way to the next show. Original routing had Amarillo booked for this day, but that was canceled before the tour already. Driving conditions are again back to normal and the weather channel seems to think, that we won't see any snow before we're in Canada. Awesome!