Sugaree: The long strange trip to Boulder...

Usually, when we take Sugaree on a trip, we feel like the world is opening up for us with the many great things that happen to us. Yesterday, however, was a different twist on that...

Since we didn't get home from Dead & Company show in Dallas until around 1:00 a.m, we hadn't packed or even cleaned the bus from the day before so we didn't leave until around 10:30. I had allowed for a little time slippage due to the Dead, but the challenges soon began. About 45 minutes into the trip, as we were going through Lewisville, I had a startling thought that I had forgotten the Dead & Company tickets. As the realization sunk in, I had Dylan search my emails and Ticketmaster and Live Nation accounts to see if they might be there. For some reason, I seemed to remember holding physical tickets. After Dylan couldn't find anything, we made the painful decision to turn around and drive back home to get the tickets. Ouch!

Forty five minutes later, we rolled back into our neighborhood and I ran inside to grab the tickets. They weren't where I would usually keep them. I searched everywhere for them, but nothing. As I searched our room, Dylan and William searched my emails, but nothing showed up. With salt being thrown on our wound, we straggled back into the bus and headed back towards Boulder with the uneasy feeling of not knowing if we would even have tickets to the shows.

Later in the afternoon, I asked Avery to call The Millennium Hotel in Boulder to let them know we wouldn't be making today's reservation, but were on our way. "What? You don't have a reservation?" she said. This didn't sound good at all. It turns out that our reservation was booked through a third-party company called reservationcounter.com and though we prepaid for the entire stay months ago, The Millennium was overbooked and we were just out of luck. They even had a website masquerading in the facade of The Millennium, but it was not. Now, here we are on the day before the 4th of July, and all Boulder hotels were all booked early in the year and we have nowhere to stay (or more importantly, park Sugaree). For the last several years, we have always stayed in The Millennium and been able to walk to Folsom Field. This is the perfect scenario, as we park Sugaree out by Boulder Creek and our friends know where to find us.

After much wrangling, the 3rd-party company said they found us a room at the Hilton Garden Inn nearby. We argued that it wasn't what we paid for, but they said it was all they could do. After waiting a few minutes, Avery calls the Hilton, only to be told there was no reservation in our name. We had to call back reservationcounter, located on some small foreign island, and argue, push and prod and cajole to get them to honor the reservation, which they finally did.

At this point, it was around 7:00 and we were all tired and hungry, so we decided to go to our favorite pho place in Amarillo called Saigon. As we pulled up, we saw that they had closed permanently so we stopped at a Schlotzky's to get some sandwiches. With food in our bellys, we made the decision to push further to Dumas (Home of the Ding Dong Daddy's) or Dalhart. We made it to Dalhart, and the goal was to just get a simple room so we could all shower in the morning. We remembered staying at the Roadway Inn a few years ago, which we had renamed the Toadway Inn. That's a funny story in itself. On one of our earlier bus trips, we stopped there and walked next door to the small-town steakhouse. After dinner, as we walked back to the motel, there was a large toad in front of every door. It was the strangest thing! They could feel the cool air coming out from under the door, so each toad took a door and they just hung out there. Thus, it's the Toadway Inn! Anyway, we pulled into the Toadway to get a room for a shower only. Nobody was willing to sleep in the place, but we could all muster a cheap shower. As I paid for the room, the woman asked for my pin number. I said, "please hand me the machine and I will punch in my pin number". "No, she said, you must give your pin number to me" I told her I wasn't about to do anything of the sort, and I suggested I pay her with cash. "Fine", she said, "if you don't trust me" but said she'd need my pin number anyway for incidentals. (What the hell kind of incidentals do they have at a Rodeway Inn in the first place?) Finally, we both hardheadedly agreed to disagree, and I told her I was not going to stay there no matter what and we headed on down the road!

We remembered a nice looking, new Holiday Inn Express that would work perfectly and it didn't look very full. We drove back to the Holiday Inn and as I pulled into our parking space, I realized that we were spewing diesel from the bottom of the bus. This was definitely not good! I went in to get a room, only to find that they were completely booked. I asked the kind clerk, Kristi, if we could stay in our RV in the parking lot while we had a mechanic come fix our bus. She was very sweet, and let us stay, which worked out perfectly. Dylan found a 24-hour mobile mechanic who came around 11:00. As J.R. poked his head under the hood, I asked him what he saw? "Oh...y'all ain't going anywhere anytime soon!" This was certainly not the news I wanted to hear, but here was the plan... Our fuel line was ruptured, and he could fix that without pulling the engine out, but he would have to go find tubing and bypass the ruptured line with the new one, similar to a heart bypass. He would call his parts stores in the morning and come fix it. I asked what the chance was of him finding an auto parts store open in Dalhart, TX on the 4th of July and he said 50/50. "If I can't find one, my uncle has a parts store about 120 miles from here and I will have him meet me halfway to get your parts". I got online, and found us General Admission tickets for both nights to Dead & Company, so we were at least going to get into the shows, provided we could still get to Boulder...

The next morning, JR showed up around 10:00 with part in hand. It only took him less than an hour to fix the problem. The part was only $37, which was sweet! The cost, however, was 25 times that amount...not so sweet, but at least we were on our way! With another dent in our armor, but undeterred, we headed back towards Boulder. Around mid-afternoon, Avery walked up to the front of the bus with a confession of sorts. "Dad..." she said sheepishly. "Yes," I said, worried about what this next curve ball could be? "I have the tickets to Boulder. I just got a reminder email, and I was the one who originally bought the tickets." Avery had the tickets all along, and we had forgotten that she ended up getting through on Ticketmaster first on the morning tickets went on sale, so she had them!

Soon after, we rolled into Boulder and pulled up next to the Hilton Garden Inn, the hotel to which we had been relocated. As I checked in, the clerk told me that the manager had just given our room away. At this point, my head spun around in circles like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and I demanded that he bring me his manager immediately. He kept his cool and continued typing frantically, until he said he had found a room. Thank God for that, as nobody wanted a scene.

At this point, we had tickets to the show, a hotel room and the bus was back in good working order. We parked a couple blocks from The Millennium, and just walked to and from our hotel, so it worked out...way better than if we had been stuck in Westminster or some other suburb outside of Boulder. Dylan's friends were staying at The Millennium, so they got us a parking pass at The Millennium and we were good to go for the weekend! What could possibly go wrong?

Fast forward to showtime on Friday night...the first Boulder show of the weekend got started to a rocking Not Fade Away and within about a minute, it started to rain. At first, it was a nice light rain, but the universe had something else in mind entirely. The second song was an appropriate Cold Rain and Snow, and within a minute into this song, the rain began coming down in saucerful raindrops. This, soon morphed into a driving hailstorm, and Bobby comes to the microphone and says, "It looks like we have a weather situation..." and the boys disappeared backstage. Over the PA, came an official voice, "Evacuate and seek shelter!" Oh shit...we had to get out of the stadium along with thousands of other Deadheads as people ran up the bleachers to the field house to get out of the hail.

Inside the field house, soaking wet Deadheads gathered and waited out the storm. Lightning was flashing as it continued to rain and hail. After about an hour of hanging out soaking wet and cold, we decided to go back and get dry clothes on since the band wasn't likely coming back on this evening. We walked back to the bus and all changed into dry clothes and got warm. David Redding checked Twitter, and realized that the band had indeed come back on shortly after we left. We hurriedly scampered back over the creek and up the big-ass hill to Folsom Stadium. We could hear China Cat>Rider playing as we walked in. We ended up missing a good handful of songs, including Cassidy, but were there to catch the rest of an awesome show!

Day Two was a great day as well, as we met many new friends and hung with old friends. Around mid-morning, a friend we had met in Albuquerque last year, Frankie, met up with us to interview our family for a Deadhead documentary she's making. She's a film student from UCLA, and she's making a documentary on the Deadhead scene and she wanted our family to be a part of the doc.

We saw a couple, Randy and Melanie Thomas, taking their photo in front of Sugaree. They had just gotten married and were still in their wedding clothes. It turns out that they're from Dallas, and Randy went to the same high school that Kelly and I did, Richardson High School. Randy and Kelly went to the same elementary school as well, though at different times. They also have a daughter named Cassidy, as do we! They said that they had taken their first photo together a few years ago in front of a psychedelic bus. The next day, they came by to show us that original photo they took, which was in front of Sugaree three years ago at a Forgotten Space show at Lee Harvey's in Dallas. What an interconnected world we live in!

We rolled into the show around 6:00, as we didn't want to get caught in the massive crowds that sometimes clog Folsom. We got in and got good seats to the left of the stage but still pretty close. This was fine for me, as I needed to be able to sit when I felt like it, and this was way less hectic than the floor. Avery hung with us before the show, at intermission and at the end, but boogied on the floor during the music. As we walked in, we got photos with a couple of characters...The Dude and Rockstar Richard. As you travel around with the Dead & Company scene, you begin to know and meet some of the recurring characters that make this an unbelievable traveling circus. Not sure of his claim to fame, but Rockstar Richard just celebrated his 100th Dead & Co show, and is always front and center. Bill Walton was also there, as he usually is, and received a huge applause from the Heads when they showed him on the big screen.

The first set opened with Scarlet>Fire, Brown Eyed Women, Loser, They Love Each Other, Birdsong, New Speedway Boogie and ended the set with Don't Ease Me In. The second set jumped right in with both feet with a jamming Playin' in the Band>Estimated>Franklins Tower, Eyes of the World>an absolutely tear-jerking Standing on the Moon>Drumz>Space>Jam (with Coltrane's Love Supreme teases)>Althea>Days Between>Not Fade Away (which they had opened yesterday's show with). Not to be outdone by themselves, they came out for a three-song encore of Ripple, Brokedown Palace and Playin' Reprise, which was cool because not only did they open the second set with Playin', but they opened up the tour at Shoreline with Playin', so this wrapped it all into a nice, neat package. I thought, and still do, that Dead & Company played the best I've ever seen them on this second night of Boulder. The Boulder shows are always special, as they conclude the summer tour and they are well attended. This ended the biggest tour yet for Dead & Company, as they have now surpassed $200 million and over two million tickets sold in their short four years together. In my mind, they deserve every bit of it, as they continue to get better and better. They're not without their warts here and there, like the Grateful Dead, but I'm eternally grateful for every note they play...wart or beauty mark!

After the show, we ambled towards the Millennium and first ran into our annual friend, Anna the Tamale Lady. We are fortunate to run into Anna every year and she usually will make a special run by Sugaree to make sure we are all well-fed. Anna drives up to Boulder every year for the Dead & Co shows from Albuquerque to sell her tamales to hungry Deadheads, and we thank her for that. She again, stopped by Sugaree on her way out to feed Dylan and his friends. We bought some tasty tamales and walked by the Boulder Brass Band, who is also banging hard on the percussion and horns every year after the shows. We hung out at the bus for awhile after the show and Kelly and I eventually strolled back to our hotel to grab some sleep, as we were heading for Beaver Creek in the morning to stay with my parents for a few days.