Tour Journal: OAL Montreal... almost

So where to begin... Lets start on Tuesday. That day was my last day at work. I was let go, without much warning, from a popular comedy club. But when a door is closed, another door... probably near the back of the house... is opened. My good friends Olenka and the Autumn Lovers where going on an east coast tour starting on Thursday. The way I looked at it, I wasn't going to have a job for about a month, I might as well be enjoying myself.

The van was to arrive in Toronto to pick me up at 12, noon. At 2pm they showed up. We were to showcase at POP Montreal later that night with a starting time of 10pm. The math sort of worked, 5 hour drive, get there at 7, quickly sign in and get to the venue for 8. What could go wrong?

Olenka is in possession of one of the worst vans currently on the road. Two tours have been changed, or reworked, because of this abomination of automotive science. So it wasn't much a surprise when somewhere around Cornwall, our windows were fogged up so bad that we had to have someone wipe it down every couple of minutes with Windex. Then, shockingly, a couple km's outside of Quebec, the van dies. It's beginning to look like we're not making the 10pm show. The folks at POP graciously decide to re-organize, and now we have a 1am start time.


The waiting game begins. We get a tow truck from CAA, he drives us into Quebec, and tells us it's a lot cheaper to get a tow truck from the Quebec side than have him drive us to Montreal. We wait again. The flat bed shows up, but wasn't informed about the taxi we were supposed to have taken care of, or the fact that we are going to Montreal. After some time, we finally get on the road, but 1am isn't going to happen.

We finally get into Montreal, our wonderful host meets us at her place and, somewhat defeated, we finally get some well deserved rest.... until...

8am. The van needs to be moved from the main road to a side street. We have a parking spot. Olenka takes the wheel, while Dan, Simon, Blair and myself begin pushing. We make a 7 point turn, and manage to parallel park with little to no damage.

Where does that leave us? Well, Olenka is on a bus back to London Ontario to get her car. We will hopefully rent a van to house the rest of us (we are talking with the folks in Young Galaxy about using theirs), and the good folks at POP are looking into another showcase for us. I guess this is life on the road!

This is my first blog post in a long time, but I hope to keep it up over the next couple of weeks, if anyone is interested.