Thanks for the coffee. I hadn't had a chance to update the site for a couple days, due to time restraints and lack of phone lines, but this morning gave me a few minutes to at least hop online to check my e-mail from a remote location, and to look into a problem that I had been hearing about. A number of times during our tour, people had been coming up to me and inquiring about our tracking unit and how it seemed that it may be malfunctioning, since more than once it had shown us at our previous location, or a couple locations back. One person had even been worried that we wouldn't show up to the gig on time, since it showed us in Omaha, when we were supposed to be in Boston. I decided to check out the situation. Sure enough, our little red tracking dot showed us HOURS away from where we actually were. Shit. I knew this would happen. I had assembled our "Lil' Trooper" by jerry-rigging one of those "Do It Yourself" radio assembly units that I had bought at Radio Shack before we left, and was praying that it would hold up over the course of the entire trip. Unfortunately, it seemed that extreme road and weather conditions had gotten the best of it, and now our frequency response was severely delayed. My experience in electronics is a bit limited and I had basically just followed the included instructions up to a point and based the modifications on schematics found on an obscure website where they also show you how to do things like build pipe bombs and get free calls at tollbooths. Unfortunately the tollbooth thing was outdated, and PacBell had since made the necessary precautions. Believe me, I tried. Anyway, I went back to the van, opened the device up and checked again to make sure that it wasn't just a loose wire or a dull battery. Everything seemed to be in order, and I had no way of troubleshooting from the road. We can only hope that it's just a delay and not completely broken. Please forgive us for the inconvenience.

We had a long drive to endure from Texas to New Mexico, so we decided to split it up into two days. We spent most of the morning with our new friend Priscilla, who had put us up for the night in her hotel room, and the first matter of importance was to fill the vacant rooms in our stomachs. We walked next door to the hip, low-key restaurant known as Star Seeds, which played nothing but Radiohead's Kid A and The Cure's Disintegration for the entire duration of our stay. We were shown to our table and ordered coffee. As we were pouring over the menu, who should walk up but John from Fivehead, dressed in shorts and a Hurricane Lamps T-shirt. We talked for a number of minutes before realizing that he was holding a waiter's notepad in his hand. "Yeah, I work here; this is my job (chuckles). Can I get you anything?" John asked us about where we were headed next, and relayed to us the dangers of our route. He had been on a tour previously and had been pulled over in Sonora, Texas on the way to El Paso for having one defunct license plate light; the entire plate was visible with the exception of the last character, but that had made all the difference for the local authorities. Their van was searched and unfortunately the dogs sniffed out three joints that their bassist had aboard. They spent the night in jail, were fined $3,000, and had to wait around for 17 hours while the ruling judge got back from a chili cook-off. Thankfully, we didn't have any incriminating cargo, but we thanked him for the caution anyway.

The rest of the day was filled with the terribly exciting task of driving ALL DAY. The only remaining highlight was when we stopped at a 66 gas station and I saw a signed picture of Johnny Depp, with the written caption, "Thanks for the coffee." Nice how I bring it full circle, eh?

Josh