since we drove about an hour up i-75 the night before our drive to niceville wasn’t too bad…i think it was about 5-5 ½ hours…niceville is a town outside of pensacola and in the general vicinity of where one chris staples was born and raised…
as soon as we got into town we met up with chris’ girlfriend hailey at this place called “turkey creek” and all went for a little swim…our a/c broke again a few days prior and we were all dying from the florida heat so swimming felt really nice…this particular creek was like a nature preserve of some sort with a boardwalk meandering through the woods…at various points there were docks out into the creek and you could jump in and float along with the current (kind of like those lazy rivers at water parks)…it was a lot of fun…
after we went to eat at a nearby pizza shop and met up with some members of the local band we were gonna be playing with that night…the group was called “gileah and the ghost train”…gileah was actually the name of the lead girl in the group and “the ghost train” was her backup band per say…one of the members was a guy named kevin who was also in the band “twothirtyeight” with chris back in the day…they were all really nice people…
this particular show was at a local church in niceville and a nice big crowd of kids showed up…we played first once again, with discover america going second and gileah and the ghost train going last…we had a pretty good response to our set but of course most everyone was there to see their hometown boy, chris staples…it was fun listening to him tell the story of us getting robbed from the stage for the millionth time…though he kind of changes it a little each time…
after the show we all went out to a local beach and hung out with a few of chris’ friends…i’m not sure what beach it was because it was dark out but it was really nice…the beaches on the gulf side of florida all have white sand so with the moonlight you could see pretty well…we ended up staying at chris’ friend owen’s house in pensacola which was about an 45 minute drive from where we played and close to where we would be playing the next night…
only one more show to go…
######Note: This post is from a tour blog that I dutifully kept during the summer of 2007 while touring with the band State Bird. It lives on solely so that one day I can prove to my children that I was once cool.