Sleep Waker - CRAZY TOUR STORIES Ep. 936

What's up, this is Frankie from Sleepwaker, and I'm going to tell you about a crazy tour story. So, we had to drive from Washington State to California, Fresno, California. We decided to go through the Suquamish Pass, because that's probably the easiest way to do it, from Oregon to California. End up hitting some traffic, and we see the AM radio signs flashing, saying that there's something ahead, and you have to change it over to that to hear what's going on. And we change it over, and they're talking about how there's a cyclone and a blizzard happening over the pass, right as we're about to go over it. All the traffic goes to a standstill, people start pulling off, putting chains on their tires, and we're like, oh, well, we don't have those, we're from Michigan, we don't have to worry about that. So, we get to this checkpoint, where they were letting people onto the pass, and the cop goes, you have to go all the way back to this town, like a couple exits before, and they'll have chains there. We go all the way back, go all the way down to this store in this city, tiny, tiny place, and the guy goes, yeah, so for your truck, or your trailer and van, it's going to be about $500. Turns out, they were only really about $200, but the guy was just trying to price gouge us, because it was the only place that had them. Pay $500 for these chains, we're like, okay, whatever, it's an investment, we'll use these for a long time. Go back onto the road, put them on, start driving up to the checkpoint, get up to it, they're like, okay, you can go ahead. We go up, and as we pull on, we see up ahead of us were all these plows that had already gone through, it was all asphalt, all cement, we were basically just destroying the chains as we went up the mountain. Like, okay, whatever, hopefully we hit some snow or something, and it actually becomes useful. Keep going, eventually plows stop, we keep going, hit a bunch of snow, so good thing we had the chains. Then we hit another checkpoint, I was like, hey guys, so up above, or up ahead, there's a big avalanche, and we can't let people pass, and the blizzard and snowstorm is just getting worse, so you're gonna have to pull off at this exit over here, and just sleep there, because you can't drive. So get off on this exit, there's a McDonald's and a gas station with a subway, so we pull into this gas station, there's like 200 cars there, because every car on the pass had to pull off somewhere, and this was apparently the spot. Pull off, get into this weird little section of the parking lot where our van fit, and our filling guitarists at the time and vocalists were like, we're gonna stay in the van, watch here, you guys go ahead, get some food, we got all their subway orders and everything, walk in, and there's one dude and a manager for like 200 people in this gas station, and the gas station's already out of food because all these people have ransacked the pre-sold stuff. Waiting in line, it's about an hour before we get to the actual front of the line, I ask the guy, I'll have this and this, and he's like, okay, cool, grabs the stuff and slices the bread, and as he slices the bread, he cuts his finger pretty bad, it starts bleeding everywhere, and so he's swearing and walks away, goes behind, you can hear him smashing things and getting real pissed, and Aaron and I are just sitting there uncomfortably, the manager runs off to go help him, it was about a 20 minute ordeal, eventually they come back to the manager and they're like, okay, cool, we'll make this stuff, give you guys a little bit of a discount, got to the end, got our food, went out, and at this point it's been like an hour and 30 minutes, so the guys are asleep already, wake them up, give them their food, and we just immediately go to our bunks and go to sleep. We wake up like four hours later, which was daytime, it was clear because we'd spent the whole day on the side of this mountain, and start going, getting out of the van and we hear things hitting the side of the van, we look around and there's chickens, someone's chicken coop had fallen over, blown away, and all these chickens were just running around the parking lot, just pecking people's cars, so we're like, this is just weird, what's going on? Get in the van, drive away, everything is fine, it's not fully plowed, so the chains are fine, and eventually we hit the end, the last little bit of it, and it's completely plowed, we're just basically ruining the chains, pull over, I take them off, because I'm like, we don't need them anymore, we're just going to ruin them, we're at the end, there's no more snow, keep going, cop pulls us over, 45 minutes later, 30 minutes later, and goes, hey, so you need to put your chains on again, because there's more snow up ahead, so I go to the side, put the chains on, we drive, and it's just destroying the chains even more, because we're still driving on asphalt, it's all plowed, hit this smallish patch of snow, and then, which was good that we had the chains, but didn't really need them, we keep going, get past this, and I'm like, okay, let's just leave them on, because I don't want to have to get out and do this all the time, it's freezing cold, my hands hurt, I've been up, I've only had four hours of sleep, keep going, and eventually we hear the chains just like, fly off the band, so I get out, pull over, look out, they're just shattered on the side of the road, we pick them up, move them over to the side, and like, just put them in the back of the trailer, like, there is nothing we could do at that point, we were out 500 bucks, we were like, okay, cool, let's buy this, we'll use them for all our tours in the future, and they were just destroyed, so eventually, we keep driving down the mountain, we're in California, the weather's nicer, like, we get to the Fresno, the venue, and start talking, start like, texting the other band that we were with, someone to call home, they chose to take a side route around the mountain and up this tiny little dinky road to the main road, and they got stuck on that dinky road and had to call AAA to get a tow truck to pull them out, tow truck comes up, pulls them out, and as it's pulling them out, it slides down the other side of the pass, and another tow truck has to come and pull that tow truck out, and they couldn't get past because the tow truck was blocking the whole road, so they were late, obviously, but luckily, they made it, because they didn't have to stop through that, like, pass when they were stopping people from going through like we did, but they made it right after our set, and we got there 10 minutes before we were supposed to go on initially, and the venue owner was so cool, such an awesome dude, gave us, like, towels, water, had food ready for us, like, all this stuff, we ended up booking the show, like, last second with the band that we were friends with for a while, Mothersound, and their drummer booked the whole thing, awesome dude, one of the best shows of the whole tour, yeah, it was definitely the light at the end of the horrible mountain pass, so that's our, that's our story, just a horrible time going through a mountain.