Kelowna + Canmore

Kelowna is a nice town. Unfortunately, they're not huge rock n' roll fans. Aside from Grant Macdonald being there, the night was a complete bust. The bar didn't enforce a cover, so we made no money, not that it mattered because no one was there anyway. Anybody who was in the bar basically left as soon as we started playing. Kelowna 1, Sleepless Nights 0.

It was good to see Grant though. That guy is as fucking fun as he was the last time I saw him - which was about 7 years ago.

Friday morning we hit the road for Canmore - which meant another snowy trek through the mountains. The weather actually wasn't terrible - a couple of snow patches here and there, but I think now that we're clear of mountains, we're lucky to say we didn't have any major incidents. We did, however, see a huge ram walking along the highway. That was extremely cool.

Canmore is a super nice town. Sort of like Jasper, but more down to earth and less rich. Its a small little mountain town, so you're surrounded by big behemoth rockies on all sides, it really is quite beautiful. Nothing can describe the gloriousness of this aspect of mother nature. Planet earth, you amaze me.

Our show was at a place called the Canmore hotel, which is actually more of a hostel than a hotel. The rooms upstairs from the bar were small little one-double-bed dealies with a sink and a dresser. The place is super old (our friends in the Details told us it's haunted) and it looks like what was once a boarding house or something. Pinky and I have been reading a bunch of Charles Bukowski - these rooms reminded me exactly of the kind of places Bukowski describes in his books. I could just picture a mean old slum lord coming to knock on our door, asking for the $2.75 rent for the week. Needless to say, it was an interesting place.

The show was decent. It was a step up from the past two nights where we basically played to nobody, but it still wasn't glamorous. A couple people were into it, dancing and the like - and we actually sold a couple CDs.

The highlight of the night for me was getting to hang out with my cousin Marcel who I haven't seen it at least five plus years. He's still as fun as he used to be. Considering he and his girlfriend Jennifer had to drive like 12 hours to get to Canmore just to to see us play, it was really great to hang out with him again. He's one of those cousins I wish was just around all the time.

Staying in hotels/hostels is a good/bad idea for us. When we can leave our gear in the bar, and go to sleep right upstairs - you know that the night is probably going to be a write off for us. Especially when the bar gives us a two-four of beer, and people keep buying you Jagr shots. It was indeed a pretty good night.

Today we got up, ate breakfast, and drove to Edmonton. On the way I read a story that Pinky's been writing about our tour - and I gotta say it's pretty good. I'm trying to convince him to make a little novel so we can sell it on our merch table in the future. The guy's got talent.

We were just talking about tonight's show, and how we hope it's going to be a step up from all our other shows since Victoria - and we realized that there might actually be a half-dozen people we know from back home who will be here.

I hope so.