Do the kids like touring?

Ready to go on the first day of our Fall 2015 tour.

I think to most parents we seem CRAZY to take our kids with us all over the country, all the time for the last 4 years.  Maybe that is true but it has worked out okay so far.  Parents we meet might picture their child on the last trip to grandma's house behaving poorly and multiply that times 5 hours a day, 300 days a year.  I think that with a little love and support kids just adapt to the environment they find themselves in.  So to answer the question "Do the kids like touring?", yes they do.  But don't take my word for it...

Where do you play?

Why do I call it tour and not just an extended family vacation?  ONE reason is Kevin books shows and plays music about 5 nights a week.  This is a lot of work(for Kevin).  I will talk about how many shows he plays in a year and where we go, in a later post.  Today's post answers the question, "Where do you play?" in the building sense. Here are a few...

The Well in South Bend, IN

Music venues like Eaden's Ballroom

Coffee shops, like this one in Salt Lake City, UT.

Small businesses like this pizza shop in Mountain Home, ID.

DIY music venue, Seventh Circle in Denver, CO

Kevin has played in restaurants, coffee shops, churches, camps, tents, backyards, bars, homeless outreach sites, music venues, youth centers, festivals, sidewalks...but the place where he plays the most is in people's homes.  A house show is a lovely way to interact with people and share and enjoy music.  This is how it works.  You pick a date for a musician to come to your house.  You invite people to come to your house on said date.  You sit or stand and listen to music with people you know really well or maybe met that night.  Overall, it's pretty great.  You might be thinking to yourself, that sounds fun, I would like to have a house show but my house is too small.  That is NOT the case, I assure you.  I will save you the Dr. Seuss description of what kinds of houses are good for house shows and just say they are ALL good.  Here are some house shows we have done recently.

The Workshop, aka Nancy's apartment.

A house show in Taylor, MI

A house show in Lansing, MI

A house show in Fort Collins, CO

What do you eat?

Once upon a time, before touring I made a meal plan for the week. I shopped once a week, with a list, and served meals at 7:30 am, noon, and 5:30 pm.  Eating out was a rare occasion, and I would say besides our love for pizza, I made fairly health meals.  Even when we are on breaks I fall back into this routine.  I only mention my natural tendencies to contrast what eating while touring is like. 

Preparing lunch is a bit of a balancing act in the car.

So what is it like?  We eat 2 or 3 meals a day. The time and place of these meals are different everyday.  Most of the time I am not making these meals either.  While I don't really like having so little control over providing meals for my family it is a GOOD and constant reminder that God provides each day what we need.

Lots of people we know travel differently, but this is how we eat on the road. We travel with a "food tub" which contains essentials like PB&J, oatmeal, utensils, plates, bowls and snacks. We also have a "cold bag" which allows us to buy things like yogurt or cheese and keep them cool until lunch or dinner.  

When it comes to breakfast, most mornings we eat it. Breakfast is either provided by our hosts or oatmeal from our food tub. Some mornings we wake up too late for breakfast to be important.


 Lunch is the most interesting meal of the day because most of the time we are on the road.  When we first started touring there was a lot of fast food dollar menu consumption.  Now there is quite a bit less, but our go to for the moment is Taco Bell.  We most often buy food for lunch at Aldi in the Midwest and East, and Grocery Outlet in the West.  The barren waste land of Wyoming and Montana where, as far as we know, neither exist, is a sad place for us. The challenge that we face is to buy just enough for one meal but also feel like we have eaten a meal.  Some of these "meals" appear below.

Lunch provided by Aldi

Lunch provided by Grocery Outlet

Lunch provided by my mom. 

Dinner is often provided at shows.  There are many, many people that provide home cooked meals for us. 

 There are many, many people that provide pizza for us (my family's FAVORITE). 

And sometimes we get to taste the local fare, a special treat.

We "shared" an cream cheese brownie, s'more cookie ice cream sandwich in Fort Collins, CO.

Here are a few confessions from eating on the road:

• Sometimes ice cream IS lunch.
• Kevin has used a CD as a knife.
• We don't refrigerate our jam.  It just stays in our food tub and has never gone bad.
• Roadside produce stands (particularly) in the south are our weakness.  We make highly impractical purchases like a whole watermelon and bags full of REALLY ripe peaches.

A Good Nights Sleep

In order to answer the question, "Where do you sleep?", I have simply taken pictures of where we have slept the past couple weeks.  As it is not my habit to document our sleeping patterns, a few places are missing, and a few pictures are staged after we have cleaned up our bedding, but you will get the picture.

Most of the time our family shares a room.

Imagine sleeping bags and an air mattress for this one.

Sometimes we have more room than we know what to do with.

Sometimes we have just enough space for everyone on tour to sleep on the floor together.  This is called "mega bed".

Sometimes we sleep at a RYFO home.  They are a network of homes who purpose to support touring bands with shelter, food and prayer.

To answer a few follow up questions:

Do you take bedding with you?

We travel with our own pillows, 2 kid sized sleeping bags and a blanket.

How do you sleep on the road?

Most of the time we sleep really well, but sometimes we don't.

Have you ever slept in your car?
No, we have never slept in the car.

If you can't find a home to stay in where do you sleep?
We have slept in the back of a record shop, a bicycle shop, info shops and a restaurant.

What if you can't find a home, record shop, bike shop, info shop or restaurant to sleep in?

We hop on Hotwire and get a hotel.  This is a rare occurrence, maybe twice a year.

Who are those other people in your pictures?
Those extra people are the other musicians we are currently touring with. They are pretty great.

What is the strangest thing that has happened to you as it pertains to places you have slept on tour?

Last fall we slept at a music venue.  We packed up our things the next morning and were ready to leave when we discovered we were locked IN the venue.  We couldn't get  a hold of our friend who ran the venue so we found a screwdriver (luckily) and Kevin took off the locks so we could get out and then replaced them.