Spring 2010 Tour
I think that I am finding a good pace with a tour schedule. I used to avoid touring because I’d often see friends return from the road weathered and burned out. And no wonder, when you look at their tour itinerary, playing somewhere every single night without a night off and driving sometimes 10 hours in a day to get to their next show. That is not appealing to me.
For me the lure of the road is to not only plant musical seeds in new places, but also to be able to experience those places. That is not possible when you have
to leave exhausted after a show to get to the next venue in a far off location. It seems that all one would see are different venue and audience variations, but nothing else. The advice I’ve often received from other troubadours are to make the tour as dense as possible in order to maximize while on the road and then get back home quickly so as to accrue as little cost as possible . I have come to disagree with that approach.
Rather than perform every night, I decided to book 4 shows a week for this tour and route them as close together as possible in order to give myself time to explore and experience the locations I go to as I plan to return to them in future tours as I tweak my route.
The biggest expense, by far, is transportation. I find that once I am already in a place, I get more of my money’s worth if I get to hang out there. I found a few paying passengers by placing rideshare ads in the town I passed through and all in all made and extra $140 to supplement my auto costs on this tour.
I keep a cooler full of food to minimize eating out and I mostly camp in national forests, state parks, or car camp if I have to. I did stay in a few hotels and hostels after some good paying shows. it was nice to have that kind of space at times.
During this tour, I used couchsurfing.org a few times. It is basically a couch exchange program, where one can list if they have a couch or bed available and it is searchable by city/town. There is a vouching system and detailed profile of all couchsurfers and hosts so that each can get a sense of who this stranger is. I used it on 3 separate occasions during this tour and met some great folks and saved lots of money.
I’m looking forward to my next paid vacation.
