West coast tour diary pt. 3

Mountain Standard Time

June 17^th, 2025

The Ranch Motel in Oakland, Oregon is home to a chicken coop toward the southern end of the property, right behind the former Ranch Lounge that seems to have served as Oakland’s third place before its closure sometime within the last few years. Unlike my visit a few months ago, the chickens were not out today, choosing to remain in their coop. Consequently this informs my decision to sit at the sole patio table outside the lobby and absorb the mountain air.

The Ranch Motel lobby is the type of rustic small town mom-and-pop establishment where kitchen appliances and snacks from Target take the place of industry-grade coffee makers, microwaves, and hospitality distributor dry goods. There’s a mostly-full pot of coffee in the Mister Coffee machine next to a basket of organic fig bars and trail mix. On the receptionist counter there’s a homemade loaf of banana bread on a serving dish. “It’s been a hit,” the man behind the desk informs me. It’s pretty good – a step up from my usual breakfast this tour, consisting of an apple, a Nature Valley bar, and a pack of trail mix with a few cups of coffee.

Today’s drive is about two and a half hours. We’re playing the Mission Theater in Portland tonight, where there would not only be live music, but also a big reunion with friends from all over the country: our friends Sam and Coral, who live in Portland; our friend Matthew, our photographer friend who lives in Scotland; my friend Yoshi, who played in Jean Shorts Jesus with Tiger Really at our show in Corvallis in March; my friend Mir, who lived in Atlanta but now lives in Dallas, the same Mir who came to our show there that I detailed in part one of this tour diary series.

On the way to the venue, we stop at a peculiar store next door to Mano Oculta, the venue we played at in Portland last year. I don’t think any of us even remember the name of the place – to get there, we simply navigate to Mano Oculta. One year later, it’s still the same as I remembered: vintage store on one side, dispensary on the other. That’s right, this place is a combination vintage store-dispensary. Not only that, but this store has deals on ounces of flower, sometimes as low as $25/ounce. Elliott walks out with a $35 ounce, and I walk out with an art deco vase that looks like a man’s head.

Right before pulling up to the venue, we make one more stop: about 10 days ago, we decided we should re-up on shirts, as it became clear we were going to be dangerously low by the halfway point of tour, and we found a printer in Portland who could turn around 150 shirts in one week for only $1,050. Our estimates were accurate and our fears were found: we had completely run out of one design of shirts and are running low on small and large sizes of the other.

After sound check, as I’m sitting in the green room, I hear my name. I look across the room and Matthew’s arrived. He’s flown in from Ohio, where he was just at Faux(chella), on a quasi-layover to go to San Antonio for a Call of Duty convention. We go to a Japanese place a few blocks away where I use my meal buyout on a $9 fried tofu bowl before taking over merch. Matthew’s been a friend of the band practically since we first met him at our show in Glasgow in February last year, and at this point in time, he’s probably seen us somewhere between 10-15 times in the United Kingdom, Oregon, and Washington. Matt’s our go-to photographer whenever we’re in the UK, and most of our most recent jaunt there was filmed by Matt for a soon-to-be-published tour documentary.

During my shift at the merch table, Sam and Coral walk into the room. Sam and Jon are both in the backing band for Weatherday, and both of them will be on tour in Europe two days after the end of this current Michael Cera Palin tour. Sam owns a shirt press and made three shirts for the three of us in MCP: two screenshots of a Grindr conversation with the opening line, “mcp tn?”, and a hoodie with a picture of an apple crumble captioned “KILL YOURSELF”, the latest arcane MCP inside joke that I won’t bother trying to explain here.

Sam and Jon are getting belligerently drunk in the green room off the sleeve of 99 Bananas miniatures after I inform them that we’ll need to drink at least 12 of them tonight to get the rest into Canada without having to declare them. I had worried that the sheer quantity of weed, alcohol, and fruit in our van would pose such a risk to us getting into Canada that I had started getting quotes from storage units near the Canadian border. Fortunately, Aren’t We Amphibians? offered to hold onto all of our contraband for us, ensuring that even if our van were searched, our plan to play Vancouver tomorrow night wouldn’t be derailed.

I’m feeling pretty good about our set after we play tonight. I replaced the heads on my kick and floor tom, both of which were in moderate condition when tour started, but have gradually warped and wrinkled in weird ways due to the extreme heat and drastic temperature changes they’ve been subject to over the last few weeks. Jon’s overshot the 99 Bananas challenge, though, and performs about as well as I did in Tucson, or so he felt, not that I was able to tell from behind the kit.

After the show, we reconvene at Sam’s and Coral’s apartment with Aren’t We Amphibians?, where the post-show kickback is centered around hot dogs by candlelight in the living room. AWA aren’t crashing here, but Jon and I are, and we’re up until about 3 in the morning even though we have a five and a half hour drive ahead of us tomorrow plus an international border to cross.

June 18^th, 2025

Around 10 AM, Elliott meets me and Jon at the apartment, and we leave quickly thereafter. Today’s a day I’ve been looking forward for a long time: our reunion with Tiger Really, whom we haven’t shared a bill with since our show at Green Auto in Vancouver last year, which was where I initially offered to be Tiger Really’s touring drummer for any American tours they may embark on should they want to avoid paying for an additional visa.

We’ve gone into and out of Canada at least three times in the past, and we generally present ourselves as being too dumb to pose a threat to national security. We don’t even really have to try very hard, to be honest. We’ve made dumb mistakes with border security in the past; this time, our mistake is entering the Nexus line by accident while trying to navigate to a different port of entry that we had heard is a better one to use if you’re carrying large loads of cargo. We’re directed to a building where we’ll have to talk to an agent as part of some sort of convoluted visa approval process due to the Nexus mishap. The agent asks for our keys to search our vehicle and asks: “I won’t find any cannabis products in there, will I?” Thank god we left AWA with all of our weed.

We’re let through within 20 minutes and arrive at Rickshaw Theater about an hour and a half after load-in started. Although the venue tonight is incredibly nice, the environs around it are shocking. For those who don’t know, Rickshaw Theater is in a neighborhood in Vancouver called Downtown Eastside. This neighborhood is apparently where all of the homeless people in the city are corralled, and when I say I’ve never seen anything like this before, I mean it. The sidewalks and buildings are in squalid condition, with practically every block lined with tents and cardboard huts on all sides. People smoke crack and meth and shoot heroin in broad daylight on the street in front of storefronts with shocking indifference to their surroundings, suggesting that the confinement of the homeless into this one neighborhood is intentional, as if to create a containment zone. It’s a horribly neglected and impoverished part of town, but all things considered, I don’t feel particularly unsafe. Our van is parked behind the venue, caged in via unlocked chainlink fence, in a darkened alleyway, yet it goes untouched the whole night, same as every other night in the past.

A month or two ago, when Tiger Really was confirmed for local support, we thought it would be fun if Lian and their drummer Amogh filled in on guitar and drums, respectively, for If It Makes You Happy, and if I sat in on drums for a Tiger Really song, later decided to be Rites of Spring. The muscle memory for all these songs is still there. I’ve said it in a previous tour dairy post, but I don’t really pride myself on being a particularly technically excellent drummer. What I do pride myself on is my ability to learn songs very quickly and never forget them. There’s still Merry-Go-Rounds and Antarcticats songs I haven’t played in 10 years that I still remember how to play, note for note. Rites of Spring was Tiger Really’s standard set closer during our west coast tour, and it’ll be their set closer again tonight.

Despite not having played the song since early April, we play the song flawlessly. I had missed playing with Lian, Cody, and Matty; when you play hundreds of shows with the same musicians, it’s incredibly refreshing to play with a new band. In my mind, Tiger Really sits somewhere between Dinner Time and Michael Cera Palin: too emo to just be jazz, too jazz to just be emo.

When Lian and Amogh take the stage for If It Makes You Happy, I’m not really sure what to do with myself. I resolve to get up and sing and dance along on stage, but the song is awkwardly slow and not particularly easy to dance to. I end up doing something similar to what Sinead O’Connor did in that one music video of hers I can’t remember at the moment, or like Michael Stipe in the music video for R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion.

It’s really a magical moment. When I first met Tiger Really last year, I was happily surprised to learn that their frontman Lian is also Asian – Chinese, to be specific. Asian representation in music is low, disproportionately so. Aside from the usual hurdles a person of color may face in the indie scene, Asian people also tend to face another hurdle: the pressure to focus on “prestigious” career paths and family, which tends to take precedence over hobbies – never careers, just hobbies – like art and music. That same first time I met Tiger Really, I left their set completely blown away by Lian’s guitar playing and lyricism. When I found out Lian’s guitar was tuned to the standard tuning the entire set, that sealed it: if I was going to enter the world of hired gun work, I want this band to be one of the bands I work with.

After the show, we go to Tiger Really’s bassist Matty’s house, where we’ll be staying for the night. I had been to Matty’s house before, as his garage is where Tiger Really practices. It’s warmer tonight than the last time I was there, and we sit outside after Elliott and I start a load of laundry. Matty’s got an indie pop project called Oogway that’s releasing an album soon, and we listen to rough mixes and talk about what we’ve been listening to lately for the rest of the night. I resolve to stay up until the wash cycle I started is complete and everything’s moved to the dryer; eventually I roll my sleeping blanket out on a bean bag in the living room and call it a night, thinking about how tomorrow, we’ll start making our way back down southeast to Atlanta.

June 19^th, 2025

After folding my laundry and drinking the remainder of a pot of coffee in Matty’s kitchen, we set out for Seattle, the city we’re starting the final week of tour in. When asked for local food options, Matty recommends Save-On-Foods, where they have a deli that makes sandwiches – including one called the Lumber Jack Sandwich, a foodstuff that Matty says is two meals in one sandwich. I’m keen on this money-saving idea, and as I peruse the cold case in the deli in the Save-On-Foods down the street from Matty’s house, I find it: a Lumber Jack Sandwich. This thing is huge. I mean, I feel like I’m in a cartoon when I hold it. It’s basically an entire loaf of bread that’s been turned into a singular sandwich. And it’s $15 – the equivalent of about $11 USD. I’m not entirely sure I can commit to eating this whole thing in one day, but I calculate: I can probably get through half now, and then a quarter before our set, and the final quarter after our set. Even if I can’t finish it, I can surely finish enough of it that $11 was a steal for what I got.

By the time we get to the venue, I’ve successfully had about half across two sessions: one at the start of the van ride, one toward the end of the van ride. It’s looking unlikely, but I wager I can still maybe finish 85-90% of it. Fortunately, Elliott messages the group chat asking if Jon or I can get them something from the pizza place next door with their meal buyout, as they won’t have time to eat anything before our set. I offer half of my remaining half of sandwich instead. There will be no food waste today.

My friend from college Lucas came to the gig, just as he has for every show I’ve played in Seattle since he moved up here for work in 2018. In a past life, Lucas and I were roommates at 492 Calhoun Street in Home Park, an apartment block consisting of two duplexes, each with six bedrooms and three bathrooms per unit, for a total of 24 bedrooms in one lot. In 2015, my friends and I successfully rented out 18 of those 24 rooms across three units, but in 2016 when the lease was up, only two of those units would renew. Lucas was one of the friends who moved in for year #2 in UTC Block as it was called, named so because most of the people from year #1 were involved with Under the Couch, the student-run music venue on Georgia Tech campus where we were all going to school.

Tonight’s show was one of the best yet this tour. We weren’t entirely sure what our ceiling for attendance is in Seattle, as the last time we played, we sold out a 100 capacity venue. Tonight’s venue is capped at 210; the final count was 192. Needless to say, Seattle is proving to be one of our best markets. After the gig, we go to Dick’s with some of Elliott’s friends who came to the show. Neither Elliott nor Jon had had Dick’s before; I had Dick’s a few times with Tiger Really. For the uninitiated, Dick’s is a walk-up fast food hamburger restaurant that has an extremely limited but extremely cheap menu and a assembly line-like food prep process. Due to the small menu and the disallowance of substitutions or alterations, hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes are mass produced for immediate delivery upon order. The sheer volume of customers is what makes this possible: you aren’t getting a burger that was made 20 minutes ago. There’s two lines for ordering, and both perpetually extend out to the sidewalk; the burger you’re getting was prepared likely within a 30 seconds of you ordering.

At this point in tour, I’m starting to worry about the tour diet. I don’t want to go into detail, lest I overthink it, but the short of it is I’m fairly certain that the constant touring I’m subjecting myself to is taking a few years off my life. The spatial and temporal constraints of tour limit your access to healthy food, which I try to offset by asking for fresh fruit, vegetables, and no-sugar-added coconut water in our rider. Sometimes, though, you don’t have much of a choice. Both sides of my family are pretty healthy, and I live a relatively active lifestyle and stick to a pretty healthy diet at home, but my mom died of colon cancer when she was 52, and I worry that I could be in for the same if I don’t take care of myself.

Come midnight, we realize it’s time we head over to the house we’re staying tonight, about 20 minutes outside of Seattle in the opposite direction of where we need to go. Fortunately, tomorrow’s an off day, so an extra 20 minutes added to our drive won’t be anything.

June 20^th, 2025

The final week of tour begins today. This week has been the subject of anxiety from the get-go, because we have multiple back-to-back nine-plus hour drives: here to Salt Lake City for our next show; Salt Lake City to Colorado Springs the day after; Colorado Springs to Lincoln; Tulsa to Nashville. At least today we have a driving day, generally a boon, but today, a source of misplaced confidence that we can leave the city at 3 PM and still knock out eight to ten hours of driving. There’s a long stretch of construction on the highway leaving the Yakima Valley region into Idaho that turns the interstate into a two-lane road, and, compounding our late start, is upending our plans. At this rate, if we’re lucky, we can maybe make it to Boise by 1 AM. Even then, that still leaves us over five hours of driving tomorrow.

As I alluded to earlier, my mom passed from colon cancer when she was 52. The date of her passing was exactly ten years ago today, June 20^th, 2015. My dad calls and we talk about her for a bit, remembering her service and burial. I don’t really remember much from that day – in the last 24 hours, I had taken a short-notice flight at 6 AM, saw her in hospice for the first (and last) time, reviewed her final will with a lawyer, started planning her service and burial, and then got a call at 6 AM the next morning from the hospital to inform me that she had passed. There was too much emotional exhaustion for memory formation. My dad told me a bit from her final days that I had forgotten: my 21-year-old self had apparently told her that I’d make something of myself, that she’d look down at me and be proud. Ten years later, I feel I’ve followed through on that promise.

The drive through western Idaho is always beautiful. I’ve done it four times now, twice with Dinner Time, and twice with Michael Cera Palin. In my head, Idaho – specifically, Boise – is a warm, sunny, beautiful place with clear skies and mountains as far as the eye can see. My perceptions of the cities I visit on tour are colored almost exclusively by the brief amounts of time I spend in them, and by sheer luck, the first time I visited Boise in July 2019 was gorgeous; the five days I spent at Treefort 2022 (which I’ve briefly detailed in an old memoir post) were gorgeous; and now, once again, I’m reminded that there’s nothing like an Idaho sunset.

As our blue dot on Google Maps inches closer to the Utah border, we start calling hotels around the Boise area, planning on stopping there for the night. Hotel prices are astronomical, with the cheapest ones still being over $200/night. Turns out the 11^th biggest rodeo in the world is in Boise tonight, and rodeo heads from near and far have flocked to the city for some rodeo action. I’m reminded of when Dinner Time played in Boise on our first national tour, and we learned we were competing with a Garth Brooks residency as we were loading in. Apparently Garth Brooks had only planned a few shows in Boise, but they sold out so quickly and there was such high demand that the mayor of Boise personally asked Garth Brooks if he could add more nights. One of those nights coincided with our show at the Handlebar downtown.

Fortunately, we’re directed to some friends of friends who live in a house in Boise, saving us over $200 on a hotel room we’re only going to be in for 10 hours. We still have five hours to go, but it’s only around midnight. We’re all going to get eight hours of sleep, and we’re all gonna be in Mormon country by noon tomorrow.

June 21^st, 2025

My goal today before we play our set tonight is to get a “dirty soda”, a concoction Mormons invented that generally consists of soda, coffee creamer, and a fruity additive like lime juice. It honestly sounds gross, but the drive-thru places that sell these beverages only exist in Utah, and I want to check it off my bucket list.

On the way to Utah, we stop at a strange rest stop in the middle of nowhere that had alpacas and goats you could feed by hand, 25 cents for a small handful of food pellets from a quarter-operated machine. The animals are very friendly and have been very well-socialized; they walk right up to you to examine you over the possibility that you may feed them.

After loading into Kilby Court and sound checking for our show tonight, I take the MCPhicle to the nearest dirty soda establishment: Swig. I’ve got orders from Jon and Josh from AWA as well as my own, and I end up ordering:

1. A diet coke with coconut, coconut cream, and lime juice for Jon,

2. A coke with coconut cream and pineapple juice for Josh, and

3. A Dr. Pepper with coconut, vanilla cream, and raspberry puree for myself.

Based on the description of dirty soda alone, I couldn’t imagine any of us wanting even the small size, so I get us all kids’ sizes. Mine ends up being pretty good, and Josh says his is pretty good too; Jon’s is terrible and he doesn’t drink any more after his first sip.

Tonight, I’m taking a gamble with my setup. We’re playing Colorado Springs tomorrow night, almost nine hours away, and we’ll need to drive as much as possible tonight. Ideally, we’ll be able to get two or so hours out of the way. After realizing that my 18” crash cymbal that I keep on the right side of my kit is labeled “Crash/Ride”, I figure I can run a minified setup for quicker striking and packing after the show: my secondary crash on the left side of my kit, and my 18” crash-ride where my crash cymbal is. I don’t usually play with this minimal of a setup, and I haven’t practiced any MCP songs with this sort of setup either, but I figure I’m probably good enough at drums that I can make it work.

Independent of the altered drum setup, I play terribly. I’m not sure what’s going on tonight, but I was stiff the whole night and making mistakes left and right. I’m not very happy with my playing and I write the night off as the type sandwiched between two long-haul drives that was never destined to be great.

Going into this final leg of tour, we were already aware that we are not going to make load-in or sound check for any of these shows. The drives are simply too long; we’d be running on 3-4 hours of sleep per night to make these timetables work. We decide that from here on out, we won’t offer to backline, we’ll aim to arrive half an hour before doors, and we’ll settle for line checks. I figure we’ll drive until 2 AM tonight, all be in bed by 3 AM, and get up at 10 AM, aiming to be on the road by 11 AM. We’ll all get seven hours of sleep and we’ll still make it to Colorado Springs with just enough time to have our merch display set up by the time doors open. Sure enough, around 2 AM, we pull into a motel in Lyman, Wyoming and get a cheap room with two beds. In usual fashion, I opt to take the floor, making a pallet out of spare pillows, much like I did in New Mexico a few weeks ago. It isn’t as comfortable this time, but it’s better than nothing. After showering, I move pillows and blankets around for a good bit, trying to make the floor as comfortable as possible. By 3 AM, I decide it’s a lost cause and simply try to sleep on what I’ve got. As I predicted, we’re all in bed by 3 AM, and we have alarms set for 10 AM for our drive to Colorado tomorrow.

June 22^nd, 2025

Today is the first of two horrible drives this final leg of tour. Today’s also our last day with Aren’t We Amphibians?; the rest of our shows this tour will be with Tongues of Fire, a band we’re friends with that’s partially based out of Asheville, partially based out of Atlanta. I’m feeling pretty well-rested at the start of the drive, and after about an hour, we stop at a truck stop Jon had been to before in a town called Little America, where a taxidermied penguin is inexplicably immortalized in a glass display in the Little America Hotel. As it turns out, the founder of Little America was an explorer who brought a penguin back from an expedition to Antarctica with the intention of bringing it to Boston, but the penguin died instead after leaving its native hemisphere.

As the drive wears on, I’m tired by the time we get to the venue. We arrive about 15 minutes before doors. Tonight’s show has sold out and there’s a small line of kids outside the venue. It’s kind of embarrassing – we’re the last band to show up, and it’s obvious by the process of elimination that we’re Michael Cera Palin, pulling up almost three hours late to our own LP tour-headlining show.

The last time I played Colorado Springs was with Dinner Time in May 2022. We got an email earlier that year asking if we were interested in playing Llamapalooza, a student-organized music festival that occurs at the end of every spring semester at Colorado College. As it turns out, one of the festival organizers lived in Atlanta when they went to high school and had seen Dinner Time play at the Drunken Unicorn multiple times before they moved to Colorado. With their help, we were able to negotiate a $2,000 guarantee plus hospitality – our largest guarantee we would ever receive. It was a pretty dumb weekender in hindsight, with us driving to Colorado Springs and back with just one show on the way there – a matinee, at that – in Lawrence, Kansas that our Kansas City-based label, The Record Machine, set up for us.

Our first few hours at Llamapalooza felt like being in a “real band” – getting to drive our van into restricted access areas for load-in, being escorted to a room stocked with La Croix and a pound of grapes in the campus library that would serve as our green room, playing in front of probably 1,000 or so kids on an expensive festival-grade stage. This illusion was quickly shattered: the audience went crazy for the bands that played before us, yelling for encores and moshing and what have you. The audience did not have the same reaction to our set. There was no enthusiasm from the crowd; kids had their backs turned, were engaging in their own conversations, staring at their phones. There was little movement and there were certainly no calls for encores, not that we would have or could have played one anyway since we weren’t headlining. After we got off stage and the next band went on, the crowd energy returned, and I knew it then: it was us, not them. We’re just not the kind of band that can build an audience.

Things are different tonight with MCP. The energy in the crowd is palpable; they’re crowd surfing and singing along. My playing is way better tonight than it was last night, which is a relief, as we generally do well in college towns, and we always do well in cities we’ve never been to before. Colorado Springs is the intersection of both, and giving the audience their money’s worth is our biggest priority tonight.

After our set, we say our goodbyes with AWA, taking several tour package photos, exchanging well-wishes, and reminding each other of XLNC Fest in August, where we’ll be reunited once again in Bay City, Michigan. I love the bands that MCP has the privilege of touring with, and AWA is no exception, from one three-piece band to another.

Unlike last night, we don’t have to knock out any of the next drive tonight. We take our time loading out and start driving in the direction of Omaha, looking for a hotel to stay at on the way. We make our way to Limon before finding a Quality Inn to stay at for the night; I once again take the floor and make a pallet out of spare pillows. The second worst drive of tour is over with; the worst won’t be for a few more days.

June 23^rd, 2025

To get from anywhere in Colorado to Omaha, you’ll have to drive across the entire state of Nebraska, or at least an equivalent width across the western part of Kansas and the central-to-eastern part of Nebraska. Either way, it’s a drive renowned for its semi-unbearable monotony. It’s like being in a Minecraft superflat world. I kind of like it. There’s something about driving through the rural midwest that feels quaint and comforting, even if no two points on the drive are distinguishable from each other.

After checking out of our hotel room, we go across the street to a Country Pride diner, a chain of diners that are run by TA that their truck stops are endowed with. Our alternative is an IHOP that has slightly worse reviews, so we take our chances with Country Pride, and quickly find that their food is as mediocre as their menu is tiny. We’re toward the end of tour, but this is our first post-hotel-checkout diner breakfast, and it’s a shame that it’s this disappointing.

When the drive started, I already knew this is going to be a relatively short entry. We’re just gunning it toward Omaha, mostly on rural two-lane highways, and there’s nothing around. I spend most of the drive calling and talking to friends back home until we’re in Lincoln, where we decide we’ll post up at a La Quinta for the night. This morning, I had a corned beef hash plate with eggs; I want to offset it by getting the exact opposite for dinner. Looking at the map, it looks like my best bet is a Panda Express, where I figure I could probably get a bowl of just rice and vegetables.

Our ETA to the La Quinta is about 9:45 PM, and Panda Express closes at 10 PM. I believe that the best possible time to go to a restaurant is right before their kitchen closes, because come closing time, they’ll surely have leftovers that are just going to be thrown away, and they’ll likely give you extra of whatever you ordered or give you free stuff. There’s a wing place in East Atlanta Village that I’ve never paid for food from under this exact principle. It turns out the distance between La Quinta and Panda Express as it appears in Google Maps is quite deceptive, though, and the walk there would take about 40 minutes. Given that they closed in 15, I think about my other options; as we pull into the La Quinta, I look around and see a Chipotle in the parking lot. Unfortunately, they’re open until 11 PM, and I’m not able to test my free/extra food hack.

Getting back to the hotel room, it’s barely even 10 PM. I eat my vegetable and rice slurry from Chipotle and realize with Jon out for a jog and to do laundry, and with Elliott about to dip for the night, I have the room effectively to myself. I decide to take a bath, which I think is a really funny thing to do on tour. That the last few weeks of sleeping on floors, transporting gear, and generally wearing my body down has given me a few aches and pains is all the excuse I need to lay in the tub for a bit.

Tonight, I resolve to go to bed (relatively) early, since tomorrow night begins two rough back-to-back drives and little time to rest, plus a new time zone to adjust to. Tonight, I’m granted a bed to myself, and I plan on using every square inch of it.