Tour Day Penultimate: Ours to Discover

I am sitting in a room different from the one in which you are sitting now.

Here I type, in Pressed Cafe in Ottawa, which will be the setting for our last show on tour. We're playing a set on Ottawa college radio tomorrow, so tour isn't quite over, but today still has an air of finality about it. Pressed is a pleasant place with vegan desserts and wild boar soup and craft beer, and over one hundred people are attending the facebook event, so it seems like tour will end on a good note.

Your correspondent at work.

It's been a long journey with highs and lows (mostly highs really). We've made some dough. We've made a lot of new friends. Found out about cool bands. Learned about the awesome music scenes and performers that seem to infest every nook and cranny of the Northeast part of this great continent if you look for them. This tour has exceeded my wildest expectations. I'm very thankful. I'm very tired. I'm very smelly.

Now, to the recap.

Two nights ago we played in Peterborough, a town of 81,000 people an hour or two outside of Toronto that somehow manages to support a rad college radio station, a music scene that varies from blooze-rock to noise and a very respectable alt-weekly. One thing this tour has done is that it completely destroyed my supercilious city-slicker notions about the backwardness/boringness of smaller municipalities.

We had a sort of knuckle-clenching ride to Peterborough because we were scheduled for a live-on-air interview on Trent radio that we were in very real danger of being late to because of evil Tronno traffic. Fortunately, we made it, and got interviewed there by a dude named Pat who asked us probably the most insightful questions of any interviewer we've ever had. Thanks Pat!

There's Pat!

Our hosts in the Borough were Dave, who we played with in Montreal a while back and plied us with beer and food and ran the show and was all-around a real sweetheart, and Wes, who let us crash in his house and was also great. We played at The Spill, which had sweet vibes.

Ersatz in Peterborough.

The Spill from another angle.

Post-Peterborough we played Toronto. I like Toronto quite a bit, but I've noticed that non-Torontonian Canadians do nothing but talk nonstop shit on Canada's largest city. I don't really get it. It's a nice place. A little horrifying Corbusian at times, but large swathes of it are really pretty.

Our first sight in Toronto. This guy really wanted to let people know he wasn't cheating the balancing.

Observe.

The venue we played at, PACT bar, had roof access, which was sick. We got a vista. The bar was also close to one of Toronto's Chinatowns, so we got killer food.

Here we are, being all profound.

 Spicy cold chicken, a recipe I had read about and was really curious to try. I really had to convince our waitress to let me order it. She was sure I would think it was awful.

Eli smells the flower we were given by a lady on roller skates on account of it being such a gorgeous day.

The Toronto show itself was a little weird. The bands we played with were very far across the musical spectrum from us, and we closed, so not that many people stuck around. The promoter Matt took really good care of us though. Thanks Matt! Also, the dudes from Eli's other band, Look Vibrant, came and watched, which was super nice. We slept at Justin from Look Vibz's parents' house, which felt luxurious.

PACT.

For the drive to Ottawa today, we decided to take scenic Highway 7, which was such a good idea! We drove through beautiful rural Ontario farm country, and it made me nostalgic for the childhood months I spent cottaging in Orillia. So excited to go there soon.

Eli takes a tour shower on 7.

Next stop, home.