America's Heartland: Epilogue

After an unexpectedly exciting and incredibly tiring week of 5 back-to-back shows in Iowa and Nebraska, it's good to be back home for a winter break!  Things only seemed to get progressively awesome as the week continued, finishing off with 3 packed houses.

It's really nice to be writing this blog post from my bed (not a hotel bed), and just to get in the mood for the next weeks off, I'm listening to Ella Fitzgerald's "Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas"!  Premature--I know--but nothing really makes a winter break officially feel like a winter break more than listening to one's favorite Christmas CD!

On Friday morning, Annette and I went down to The Mill coffee shop in downtown Lincoln, NE, to do a radio interview.  It's wonderfully disarming to duck into a coffee shop on a cold, rainy morning, sit down with a warm latte, and chat at a table in the back corner with a great host.  No frills, no sound-proof studio rooms, no producers with headsets and clipboards; just a live broadcast of some people casually talking about the arts into microphones.  It was a fantastic experience.  [If you want to listen to the podcast version of the interview, go here, let the podcast fully download, and then start listening around 3/4 of the way through the interview--we were the last segment of the broadcast.]

L to R: Dean Marshall (Co-Founder and Musical Director of Barrage), me, Annette, and William Stibor of "Friday Live" on NET 91.1

It was such a blast playing at the Lied Center in Lincoln!  A packed house (nearly 2,200 people!), a great venue, and a great city.  Lincoln rocks.

The next morning we had to make a 4.5 hour drive to Mount Vernon, Iowa.  I had the backseat to myself when we got in the car, so I pulled down the arm rest/center console to get cozy for a short nap.  When I awoke, I caught a shocking glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror:

This is what happens when you fall asleep on your side with wet hair.

Here are some more pictures from our drive:

Mind-numbing thought of the day: Michael Jordan is so famous that the back of his head is instantly recognizable.

Wind turbine blade in transport.

We finished up last night with a sold-out, return performance in Mount Vernon, IA, capping off a stellar week.

But the hardest part was yet to come...today's trip home.

For those of you who read about last week's trip home from Oklahoma, this was, fortunately, nothing of that sort. Today's trip was just a case-in-point of the "hard travel days" you may have heard touring-types bemoan.  Most notably, it consisted of 3 hours of sleep and then catching a shuttle to the airport at 4:15 a.m. this morning.

And, just as proof that arriving at an airport that early should be considered cruel and unusual, I'll leave you with this photo of what I saw when I arrived:

Good morning to you, employees of AirTran!