Winnipeg idiots

9.00 in the bus approaching Regina, SK. Weather looks beautiful, but is actually freezing. I want to go to California!

Was yesterday's show better than cancelling it? Not really sure. The venue was shit. Gear was shit. Turnout was shit. But there were people wearing Moonsorrow and Korpiklaani shirts and they got good shows so I guess it was worth. The original promoter had probably known already for a while that he's not going to organize the show. Practically no advertizing and even the venue had posters of the Testament show happening on the same day, but not Paganfest posters. Oh well, live and learn. In Europe we've grown out from the venues like that but obviously there's still some ground work to be done in some parts of the world. Luckily the venue was in the same building with a motel. Woohoo! Shower!

Oh yeah. Not a day without an idiot. This time it was four of them. Already from the early evening there were also four motorcycle gang members in the venue. Or some other gang, maybe not motorcycle but still wearing the gang vests. When we were about to start our show and Cane walked in wearing his "Happy Little Boozers - Beerland" vest those idiots surrounded him and started to push him around asking about the gang he's in. They couldn't understand that it's not a gang, it's a band. Suddenly one of them approached him from behind and just tore the vest off. I can only admire Cane keeping cool. In the same situation, someone attacking me, I would've gone berzerk. I am a nice, calm person, but touch me and you're dead. Maybe with the four idiots it would have been me dying so it was good it was Cane. All this added a nice little touch to the show. Are we going to be beaten up after the show? Later I heard that they had been harrassing also our merchandiser Nick because of our common "Korpiklaani - Finland" skull t-shirts. What a bunch of wankers.

Today's venue is the smallest of the tour. Do they have shower? Do they have internet? I can only hope.

Internet laundry

Woohoo! Free internet! In the self service laundry. The only reason I came to do some laundry was the free internet. I have enough clean clothes for the entire tour.

The venue seems to be located in a village called Osborne. I guess it's a suburb of Winnipeg. At first sight it seems that there's nothing around here but there actually is lots of stores, small novelty shops, liquer stores and restaurants. Show's presale is really bad but at least we're doing it. Beats the cancellation.

Cancelled, not cancelled, whatever

Around 7 in the morning, approaching Canadian border. I hope all goes well there. At the border I mean. We've crossed it already twice on this tour with no problems but this crossing point is the one where Canada trains all their border control officers and is supposed to be a bit tricky. They may take any vehicle and decide to use it as training material for the most thorough search they know. We'll see.

Yesterday's show was again quite good one. As I said earlier the place was a shithole but technically pretty good and it was pretty much filled with the great audience so we have nothing to complain about the show itself. We added "Crows Bring The Spring" to the set last night. We didn't really leave anything out. We didn't do "Metsämies" but that's been on and off the whole tour.

Now we're heading to Winnipeg. For a few days there's been some speculation if the show will happen or not. The tour manager has been saying that there's a 90% chance of cancellation and when I asked why exactly he answered: "Because the local promoter is an idiot." Apparently someone has sold the tour package to local promoters when Eluveitie was still included and when they dropped out that someone jsut forgot to inform the local promoters about the change. They are now basically getting less for the same money and therefore some of them have been a bit difficult. Yesterday afternoon we got the final work: "Tomorrow's an off day." However later in the evening we got even more final word: "We're on tomorrow." So, it got cancelled already but the owner of the venue decided to have the show anyway so the local promoter was just dropped off and we're on as usual.

This bus network is brilliant but it only works in the USA so in Canada we have to rely on the venues' networks. Hopefully they have networks there too.