Thursday: We left dreary, rainy Atlanta after being delayed for a couple of hours...
...and landed in sunny Tampa!
This evening's weather outlook was imperfect at best. The line of storms that had crashed through Georgia was still getting dragged out of the Gulf of Mexico. To try and fit it all in, the start time for our show was moved from 9 to 8:30 PM.
Pretty nice gig, though! I think some people stayed away because of the threat of a rain, but it was still decent crowd, and the breeze from the oncoming storm was kind of pleasant. We played alright--it took a while for everybody to relax and settle in, but for the most part, the night moved along quickly.
Immediately after the gig, I looked at my phone. Hmmm, tornado warning...is the warning the bad one, or is it a tornado watch that's bad? WARNING! I headed back to the stage and began packing in a hurry, and put the last piece of my gear in the case just as the blowing rain began.
Friday: Off to Ft. Lauderdale (the routing for this trip--Tampa to Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando--is not ideal). This place reminds of me of a place we used to play in Atlanta called Andrews Upstairs. It holds the right number of people for where we're at in south Florida right now, but it's kind of a trashy-early-2000s--Buckhead thing (probably only makes sense if you're from Atlanta).
One thing I do like about this place--there is an excellent vegan cafe/store around the corner, and I had a wonderful meatless meatball sandwich. Fantastic.
We added in Lionel Richie's Running with the Night tonight--a new one for us. Other than that, it was business as usual. The EWI's batteries died and I had to swap them out over the course of three or four songs, and I sweated that, but yeah, everything else was same as ever.
I had the solo room on this night, and the hotel put me in some kind of crazy suite that was bigger than any apartment I ever lived in. I felt weird going into the other room and turning out the light.
Saturday: Up the Turnpike we go to Orlando, a drive I have made on more than one occasion.
This evening's gig sold out, which, according to the internet, was 2,500 people. Damn! That's really cool. Nice gig. Nice weather, too!
The keyboard stands made it to the gig tonight. I'm cool with them as long as someone else puts them together and takes them apart!
We brought Peaches, our lighting guy, for this show, and had some really good moments, such as this one during Baker Street.
