4-Feb-2011: Blizzard Day-off #2

5 AM
I woke-up around 4am when the nightliner started to slide and hit the concrete barrier on the freeway. John (Andersson, merch for FT and E) had been sitting in front when it happened and he said that it was "scary as hell" to feel that the bus was not under control anymore. John also told me, that there was policemen blocking the way to the freeway and now, around 5am, we are parked on the yard of a gas station and are just waiting, how the weather develops and we also need to understand if we can drive in Texas at the moment. My hunch is saying, that we may need to cancel also the Austin show, which would suck big time. Time to get some more sleep and to wait for the final decision for today. The nature has really turned against us with the volcano on 2010 April tour and this strom of the century on this one. But safety comes first and I believe that taking this stop was the best possible decision for everyone on this tour.

11 AM
It seems, that we can't make it to Austin after all with this current weather. This tour is going to be renamed to "F**k the show"-tour unless we manage to pull off this gas station really soon... We're still in the same gas station as we were in six hours earlier and nobody knows, what's going to happen next. Skid (tour manager) just told us, that we have none more hours to drive, which probably means that we need to cancel Austin show. Time to continue reading books and waiting something good to happen to the tour for a change.

1 PM
Now it's official, we have no way to get on time (or at all) to Austin unless someone in the bus is inventing a teleport. Texas state roads were mostly closed in the morning and now it's too late to drive from Jackson, Mississippi to Austin. But we will do everything in our power to make it to Forth Worth already today/tonight. Fingers crossed!

REST OF THE DAY
Our day continued with deejaying, babbling and drinking some to pass the time. We were planning to drive almost to Forth Worth until the road conditions got worse again and the other bus was taking a short slide. We planned to do a short video diary for one Finnish site, but that didn't really work out as well as expected because nobody wasn't that motivated to do a video-diary, but we'll post something to here/YouTube from this day as soon as someone has time and energy to edit the video.

Pete bought this beer bottle warmer. Strange product, isn't warm beer pretty crappy? Mika is having the party of his life in the background...

Our drivers informed us, that we have to stop for the night and we found some small bunch of gas stations, junk-food chains and hotels where we parked. Everyone started to look for two things: decent food and more booze. Well, there's a lot of counties in US, that do not sell any alcoholic beverages in any stores and we had landed in one of those. That was the 1st defeat, but not a major one because there wouldn't have been anything else besides our nightliners to party in. Only bar in the area had closed at 10pm - on a Friday night - and when we got that info, it was time to look for that decent food.

Someone's BMW on ice. Kristian prefers whiskey on the rocks...

We seemed to have three options: vegetarian unfriendly McDonald's, Subways (which we had used earlier in the day) and another place called Dairy Palace. We chose the latter to realize, that it was probably even worse except for being less politically incorrect. Well, the food was pretty awful, super greasy and very bad texture. Everyone felt disgusted after the meal - just as junk food should make us feel.

Kristian is faking when he's giving a review for his veggie burger. Look at his eyes to see the real feeling.

Sami after his burrito. Yummy or not?

I finished the day watching a preview version of "Hollow"-video, which was matching my feeling perfectly. Casper and his team at Jawbreaker Productions had done really great job with the video, we're stoked to release it some time soon!