A month ago, I went on tour with Racing Mount Pleasant. These are some photos from my time in the van and the places we passed through along the way. You learn pretty quickly that touring is mostly the space between things. Highways and gas stations. Somebody always asleep. Somebody always hungry. A soccer ball appearing whenever the van stopped moving for more than ten minutes, as if every parking lot in America had been built specifically for killing an hour before load-in.
Somewhere along the way we ended up at an Airbnb where the drapes were almost the exact same color as the walls, an interior design decision somebody had clearly felt very confident about, even tho the should not have been. We watched a documentary about Steely Dan there. At 12:43 in the morning, a bunk bed collapsed. Tyler slept on an air mattress practically underneath the dining room table. Sam Dubose stepped on a cactus at a rest stop because I had dragged everyone away from the van to take photos under a tree. There were Walmart runs, long stretches of highway, half-finished conversations picked back up three cities later, and an impressive amount of time spent figuring out where everyone was going to sleep.
None of this had much to do with playing music, which meant, of course, that it had everything to do with being on tour. The shows might be the reason everyone gets in the van, but most of the trip happens somewhere else entirely, in parking lots, kitchens, gas stations, borrowed rooms, and the hours spent watching the road through a window. The small, mostly useless moments that take up nearly the entire day somehow become the part you miss once there is nowhere left to go.
I miss being in that van.
