(19) Burlington, Concord

Tuesday, November 4th: ELECTION DAY! Besides listening to MSNBC talk all morning about almost nothing important, I tried to do some work for the last few venues that we’ll be going to before our holiday break. We started our load in at 2:00pm. The crew was phenomenal and the load in went extremely fast. I even had time to do some paint touch ups. We were mostly done by 6:00pm and Caroline, Jill, Rudy and I went to Wal-Mart to do some show shopping. Eric stuck around for an extra half hour to work on some lighting cues. We were back at the hotel just after 7:00pm. Caroline and I went to T Bones, the restaurant right next to the hotel, and got some food to take back to hotel. We sat in the lobby at the hotel, eating our dinner and watching the polls close. Jeffrey met up with us in the lobby and when we were done with dinner we all went up to Caroline’s room to watch the rest of the results. I was pretty excited when Ohio and Pennsylvania were projected for Obama. Around 10:30pm, I went back to my own room because I was already falling asleep. I woke up around 11:00pm when they projected California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii for Obama. I fell back asleep and woke up again to hear the beginning of McCain’s concession speech. I fell back asleep again and woke up to hear Obama’s acceptance speech. Finally, I fell back asleep with a new President!

Wednesday, November 5th: We had 2 shows at 9:30am(24) and 12:00noon(25). In between the shows we had a backstage tour for a small group of about 20 kids from Lake Champlain Elementary. They had lots of very good questions and seemed to be interested in our answers. Load out went without any problems and we headed back to the hotel for the afternoon. Caroline had been looking into going over the border to Canada(which is about 45 miles away) because she had never been there. We found out that we couldn’t drive one of the vans over the border because it was being rented by a government organization. So Caroline, Eric, Rudy and I rented a car and started the drive. We got to the border and had a wonderful time explaining to the border agent that we were just going to Montreal for a couple of hours. The road from the Canadian border to Montreal was mostly province routes(like state routes) through small villages (or whatever they call them in Canada.) We made it almost to Montreal before hitting traffic and turning off to find post cards and t-shirts. Luckily, at the exit we got off at, there was a mall which we walked around. We found a hallmark store with post cards and had a good time speed walking around the mall. We got back in the rental car and drove over to a Wal-Mart to look for t-shirts. We found everything we were looking for and took off on the drive back to Burlington, Vermont. We were only in Canada for a couple of hours but it was fun regardless.

Thursday, November 6th: I made a number of phone calls and did a lot of final paperwork this morning for our last couple of venues. We drove 158 miles (3327 total miles) to Concord, New Hampshire. That evening we loaded in at the Capitol Center for the Arts. It was a pretty simple and we were home by 10:00pm after getting dinner.

Friday, November 7th: We had two shows 10:00am(26) and 12:00noon(27). The performers did a talk back after the second show before going to lunch. This meant that we finished load out before they were back, giving us enough time to go get lunch before we left town. This normally doesn’t happen. Usually, as soon as the truck door is closed the vans and trucks immediately leave for the hotel or the next city. This means that the tech crew usually doesn’t eat until we stop on the road somewhere. Unfortunately, we haven’t quite figured out a way around this yet, but I feel like we will on the next leg of the tour. Since today was different, the tech crew went down to a Chinese/Japanese restaurant and had lunch before we drove 132 miles (3459 total miles) to New Bedford, Massachusetts. About an hour after we arrived, the Tech crew left again for a production meeting at The Olive Garden. It was probably the best idea we had had in a really long time. We relaxed and had a nice long dinner while discussing the upcoming venues.