Sarah McQuaid: Tour Diary

On Saturday morning we finally got to meet Jil Chambless, who’d had a gig of her own the previous evening and hadn’t got home until after we were in bed. She made Martin a wonderfully healthy breakfast -- see how happy he looks to be eating it:

I managed to do a bit of computer catch-up work in the morning, trying to bring my tour diary back up to date, and also did some much-needed laundry. It’s amazing how pathetically grateful one becomes when on the road for access to laundry machines and good wifi connections. All too soon it was time to head off for Chattanooga. Here’s a photo of Dan and Jil outside their house, taken just before we left:

The drive to Chattanooga was uneventful, and we got there in time to check into our lodgings at the Rodeway Inn, where it was evident from the distinctive mark on the carpet that a previous occupant had had a mishap while pressing clothes:

We headed to the venue -- a small church that hosts a coffeehouse gig every Saturday night. Nobody was there when we arrived, so we walked to a nearby pizza parlour and ordered a takeaway pizza. By the time we got back, organiser Andrew Kelsay had arrived, and I did a quick soundcheck before the show.

Two volunteers joined me for the canon: Kate Briere and David Fly. Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, but here they are:

Back at the hotel afterwards, I stayed up far too late creating the little maps that now adorn each page of the tour diary. “Almost finished,” I kept saying. “Almost finished. Just a couple more to do ....” I think it was nearly two in the morning when I finally saved the last map and switched the laptop off.

Or maybe it was one in the morning, because we’d entered a strange web of time changes: Chattanooga was an hour ahead of Tuscaloosa, where we’d been the previous night, but at midnight on Saturday night, Daylight Savings Time came into effect, causing the clocks to go forward; however, Nashville (our destination for Sunday) was in the same time zone as Tuscaloosa, an hour behind Chattanooga, so that negated the “spring forward” effect ... Oh, it’s too confusing to think about.