dragons 1976 virginia 2-10 through 12 2005

we finished our tour by going to virginia - two towns, richmond & charlottesville. i'd never been to richmond before, only passed it on i-95 before and never really thought it would be a nice place to hang out in, but i was wrong - it's a nice looking town with lots of old architecture, harking back to colonial days and all of that. we played at a place called emilio's, which serves tapas and has music several nights a week. we shared the night with an improvising quartet led by Marty McCavitt on the laptop. they were pretty good - reminded me of supersilent. a good chunk of the crowd were relatives of jason's - so they were all rambunctious in their support of our playing. the ajemian's tried to keep us out late - they succeeded with jason, but tim & i headed back earlier to charels ajemian's place. the next day we got to cruise around richmond a bit, seeing the avenue of monuments. the road that has all the big statues of the civil war southern generals and other important people. it's kind of strange when you think of it - having monuments to a country that broke away from united states.
we stayed in town for dinner before taking the hour drive to charlottesville where we stayed the night. a nice day in charlottesville with clear skies and good coffee. we played at the tea house again, where we played just last october. afterwards stopped in at a dance party - met some locals; my friend drew thiemann came down from DC. actually the most memorable thing of the evening was this crazy guy in some sort of flowery robe at the tea house. when Drew got there, he had put his things on a bar stool. this crazy guy comes by and tosses all of Drew's things on the floor. a few minutes later he butts into our conversation which was about chicago. patrick (friend we stayed with) & i both ask him why he threw the things on the floor - he gets real upset, bends a fork in his hand threateningly and asks if we want to talk about it outside. freak.
we had the long drive back to chicago the next day - 13 hours, home at 1 am.