References to The Price Is Right aside, the Pipes gifted me something truly wonderful today for my birthday. It’s a new tour-mobile! In the next coming months I hope to post more little adventures like these, so stay tuned!
Click on the photo to see it larger! Photos by the talented Shannon Lepere.
So it turns out that I have a lot of friends in Ottawa. For some strange reason, there are quite a lot of Thunder Bay-ites that have decided to relocate there. Is it because it’s like southern Ontario while still being ‘North’? Who knows.
Anyway, this particular stop wasn’t on my birthday (NB, almost every other visit to Ottawa has been on October 9th), but rather a bitterly cold evening in March. I stayed (as usual) with my good friends Iggi and Alicia, who unfortunately couldn’t make it to the show because his family’s genes have decided that they were all to inherit very weak achilles tendons. Stuck in a wheelchair, winter is not a very convenient time to try to take public transportation around town.
Either way, I loaded into Zaphod’s for the first time, and met with Liam Epps (from Ace Kinkaid) and the Acorn Trail, the two other acts on the bill. As you know, Liam and I now go way back as I even spent last thanksgiving with his family in Kitchener, playing trivial pursuit on a team with his grandmother. We lost.
So, before the show began, Shannon and I met up with our friend Diane for some Mexican eats, and this very small little restaurant near the marketplace. I was so excited because it has been years since I’ve had Inca Kola (the last time was when I was visiting Machu Picchu in Peru).
Eventually, the show started at Zaphod Beeblebrox (named after Douglas Adams’ The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and Liam showed me up as an analog one-man-band. He combined his drumming skills while playing a mandolin and some other things as well, all at once. I went up afterwards, and was then followed by the Acorn Trail, currently a three-piece, but it was really nice to see a band incorporate a lapsteel guitar, not a very common instrument for indie acts.
The show was over by 11pm, a nice change from the usual 3am. There was a long lineup of Thunder Bay friends to hug and catch up with, so I didn’t get to spend as much time with you all as I would have liked, but there’s always next October!