the drive to tampa from savannah was about 6 hours…pretty much our standard driving time for this tour…i don’t think we had one drive over 6 hours and by this time we were all pretty used to it…with the end of the tour in sight though, we were all getting worn down and missing home…

these last three shows were all set up by chris and since they were in his home state promised to all be pretty good…in tampa we played a bar called the “new world brewery”…it was in an old part of tampa called ybor city…they had a working trolley and a lot of cool old buildings as well…we bummed around town for a while and had dinner before we loaded in (shows in bars typically start a lot later for those of you who might wonder about that)…

this one started around 10pm if i remember correctly…state bird played first, then discover america and then this local band called “mouse fire”…there wasn’t a huge turnout for the show but it was definitely a lot better than the savannah show…a lot of people were really into chris’ set which was cool…mouse fire was also very good…they were really tight and had a great live sound…a few of their members used to be in a band called anberlin which i’m sure some of you have heard of…

we met a few kids after the show that had actually saw us play at cornerstone a few weeks back and got wind of our show in tampa and made about an hour’s drive to come see us…so that was pretty neat…

afterwards we ended up just getting a hotel again…one of the members of mouse fire was going to put us up at his house but it was 45 minutes in the wrong direction so we just decided to head about an hour in the right direction and grab another hotel…we were usually so exhausted by that time at night that having an actual bed to sleep in made alot more sense…

######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.