Chinese Broccoli

May 29: WINNIPEG TO MINNEAPOLIS

With Winnipeg continuing to provide nothing tempting at all, and Minneapolis being a 9 hour drive (with a border crossing) away, we settle in for our last Tim Horton's breakfast stop. I try one of them there breakfast sandwiches—it's actually pretty good. I'm doing a better job at eating something reasonable such that I might feel somewhat human later in the day. When possible.

We drive through Manitoba farmland under grey grey skies, Utility poles and infinite overcast landscape. Listening to Bad Moon Rising.

10:50: A truck with "truck testicles" passes us.
10:51: A bus with a handwritten license plate passes us. It's literally written in marker where the license plate would be, right on the bus. Very low-budget, these Manitobans.

11:50: I spend $40 on binational novelty socks, postcards and maple creme cookies at the Emerson, Manitoba duty free store. In the parking lot Allison and Davey and I see a ground squirrel and then a little black shrew, which I chase with my camera until she runs under a fence and smuggles herself across the border. We are now crossing into the USA at Pembina, North Dakota, with five gym socks drying on the dashboard.

At customs they pull us aside into the building and have us sit in the little white room while they supposedly search the van. We empty our pockets onto a big stainless steel table, and they confiscate our cell phones for twenty minutes. I'm pretty sure they didn't even really search the van much at all, they just wanted to see if we would crack under the pressure of being re-interviewed and made to wait in the little room. That or they just wanted to make some long-distance phone calls. We are released without incident after about a half-hour wait.

In North Dakota, the clouds have parted for sunny plains and the Cult's "Love Removal Machine" is on the radio and Davey is pumped.

Michael remarks that the USA means the freedom to have shitty roads. At least the speed limit is 75 here.

2:00: We stop for gas at the Superpumper gas station in Grand Forks, ND. (And I forget to listen to my favourite Joel Phelps song to commemorate this.) At the gas station I see that Old Dutch Chips in the US have no anthropomorphic cartoons on 'em whatsoever. They're the exact same chips trying to look all classy. Putting on airs, says I.

Allison emerges from the ladies' room at Superpumper and announces that instead of French Ticklers in the vending machine they have Freedom Ticklers. I try to buy one with $0.75 CDN in quarters but the machine rips me off. At the register I buy some Mrs. Freshley's Red Velvet Snack Cakes and a Gatorade (they were out of Andy Capp SUPER Hot Fries) and I mention the machine's malfunction.

Liz: Um, I tried to buy something in the machine at the bathroom but it just took my money and didn't dispense anything.
Superpumper Clerk [hands me $0.75 USD, earning me $0.05 cents CDN in PURE PROFIT!]: Here you go. Don't put this back in the machine if it's broken.
[Superpumper clerk turns to female coworker and suggests she go in and try to fix the machine]
Superpumper Clerk: Which item were you trying to buy again?
Liz: Um. Freedom Tickler.

Around 3:00 I finally bust out the iPod and listen to an episode and a half of This American Life while drifting in and out of sleep. When I wake up it is pouring down rain on the blurry boring vistas of I-94. There is nothing to see and there feels like even less to do. I grudgingly decide I will get some work done, but the battery on my laptop is low due to having kicked the adapter out of the wall last night in my sleep in Winnipeg. I attempt the clunky scary power inverter I brought along for just such times—but it won't fit in the van's cigarette lighter. Oh well. I go back to the default activity of eating out of sheer boredom.

5:00 As if to welcome us back to the USA, we see a bald eagle.

6:00 The band has an argument for the last 30 miles of our drive, but it's one of those arguments where everybody is just grouchy and actually really loves each other. Frankly these dudes get along really well, especially for people having to suffer through days of 8+ hour drives.

Minneapolis is awesome, though the club is in a strange part of town (all Somalians and mentally ill white people) and I don't have much motivation to wander off and do stuff. I check email on from some stray wireless signal somewhere on the street and a mentally ill white guy walks past me and says, "It's Karl. With a K." I nod at him and he says, "Thank you."

The Triple Rock is intimate and small but their sandwiches are anything BUT small. The club is nice enough to hook me—the interloper!—up with free food, and I eat the most amount of anything I've had in days, a veggie po' boy spilling out with potatoes and cheese and onions and stuff. More than one person either laughs at me or points at my food, and that's without me even finishing it! Awesome Color and Dinosaur are both excellent, again, but I don't dance or take pictures because I'm just burned out, and also full. After the show I find out that there is a competing tour diary being kept by David, Dinosaur's tour manager, and also that all of Dinosaur Jr. are really weirded out that the people in Awesome Color are sports fans.

We spend the night at Michael's and my friend Emily's amazing house in Northeast Minneapolis—they have set up beds for us in their *screening room* (!)—and Allison and I stay up a little late drinking and looking up things like "funny tornado" and "karate chimp" and "kangaroo kick" and "otters holding hands" on YouTube while everyone else snores. Pretty wild rock and roll times!