Last August I quit my corporate day job as a technical writer to follow my passion and now work full time as a touring musician. These are some of the stops I've made along the way.

Helsinki, Finland
Over the past few years I've developed a fear of flying, so there was some irony in the fact that my first gig with our group, Buckets and Tap Shoes, was 4396 miles away from home (Minneapolis, Minnesota). I work for the Minnesota Fringe and had (in race terms) taken a few too many shots of the kossack's sword at the closing night party, and an early morning flight to JFK to catch a flight to Helsinki on top of some xanax and beer resulted in looking road weary even before setting off. It's hard enough to get through security these days, but when your group is trying to explain to gate agents why they need to check a tower of plastic pickle buckets, the result is either uproarious laughter and an upgrade to better seats, or a stern sniff and middle seats in the back row of the plane. Thank god the Finns have a sense of humor. I've traveled often in Europe, sometimes for vacation and other times to play shows, but this was my first time in Finland. The people are amazing, Helsinki itself is beautiful and full of culture and music. The largest problem we had was trying to figure out how to eat. This might sound like an incredibly crazy thing, but the Finns have eating and drinking establishments broken down into a few different categories: restaurants, cafes, bar restaurants, bar cafes, cafes, bars, and restaurant cafes. However, the only place where food was served on a regular basis was in the plain old restaurants. My Finnish diet, therefore consisted mainly of the local specialty, Lapin Kulta. The bass player and I rented a car on our last full day and decided to get out of Helsinki. We ended up heading towards a village called Snappertuna, where the Duke of Tuna once held off the Danes trying to invade. The roads continued to narrow around the castle ruins, and we didn't really see anything that looked like a parking lot. We pulled up in front of a cafe where these women started yelling at us "you can't drive here--this is a walking path. Didn't you see the blue sign?" We saw the sign, sure. And it looked like this:

Wallingford, Connecticut

We left on a six week tour at the beginning of October. I had some conflicts that kept me from the first couple days, so I ended up taking my own car in addition to our van. I met up with them in Wallingford, Connecticut, where we played a sho at the prep school Choate Rosemary Hall. We're a bunch of public school educated 20somethings that decided that music and entertaining is what we want to do with our lives. We were definitley out of our element amongst the prep school crowd. I overheard one woman say to another "my husband has decided we're a BMW family instead of a Mercedes family. I wish he'd decided that last year because the models were much cuter!" I resisted the urge to tell her that we travel around the country in a 1989 Chevy conversion van whose back doors are duct taped shut. And that we have to start with a screwdriver.

This page is under construction. For more tales of my adventures, click here.

Update November 6th 2007

Since this is my own page that I forgot about, wanted to give a NEW LINK to where most of my travels can be found. And I'll be back soon with more stories.