After originally deciding that I wouldn't be able to do it because I fell down the steps on the deck yesterday and hurt my knee.. I decided I'd be okay to walk around Union Lake with Ryan.
We had no real idea of where we were going.. we followed trails for the most part but we weren't sure where they were leading. We also were constantly pulling ticks off of ourselves and each other. In total we had 114. That's an insane amount of ticks.
After a few hours we came out on Sherman Avenue. We weren't expecting that.. but we walked down the road in the direction of the river and tried to find a path near the river but only found thick growth.
We decided to brave it and make our own path. This is a picture of one of the only solid areas we could stand on during this part of the walk. It was mainly marsh area where we were spending most of the time hopping over pools of water and standing precariously on tree roots and moss. It was a pain to get through the thick brush and eventually we decided that we couldn't get through easy enough to try, especially not knowing where we were going.
So we turned around and headed back and while trying to traverse one of the aforementioned pools of water, I stepped on a rotten log that crumbled under my foot causing me to lose my balance and sink up to my waist in the mud/water. While trying to get out, my other foot slipped in. I managed to get out while Ryan attempted to get to where I was to help. We found another path around and continued heading back to the road.
As we continued, Ryan met the same fate as I had just moments earlier at a different water crossing. We went to the river after we got out to the road to wash our legs off a bit. We walked down to the hospital to use the phone since my cell phone was killed when my waist pocket hit the water. Katie came and picked us up and dropped us off so we could clean up. It was a crazy walk and we didn't make it all the way around but it was a lot of fun.
Later at night, Katie and I went to the Random Tea Room in Philly. It was a really small tea house with a lot of different tea. It was kind of hard to really choose anything because the lights were really low and it was hard to read the menu. It was just as hard to hear the guy at the counter recite the names of teas because the musicians were playing loud, annoying music. Not a good experience. It seems like a cool little place if there were someplace to sit and less annoying musicians.
We came home after having some berry iced teas and that was that.
The beginning of my day was spent cleaning, running and playing a game of disc golf by myself. At around four, we met up at Jeff's and packed up the car to head to Philly for our first show in the city. We got to the North Star Bar right on time.
We had to load in onto the stage through the back door. We were pretty excited to be playing here since we've seen great bands play this stage before.
We didn't spend much time there, but we set up in the band area downstairs. Before our set we spent most of our time out in the bar eating veggie quesadillas, drinking beer and watching Curb Your Enthusiasm with closed captions. Still funny.
After the second band, Practically Single, who were really good, we set up and got ready to play. We played all of our usual originals to a decent crowd. It was a lot of fun to be playing that venue even if we weren't perfect. We did alright with ticket sales as well, according to the promoter.
We hung out for a while after our set while this guy hit on Katie. That was entertaining. He's a Star Trek fan.
Overall I'd say our first Philly show went pretty good. I had fun, ate good food, drank good beer and Sam got really drunk, even better! Hope we can play again some day.
