Hello again and welcome to the third and final entry of this White Wives dispatch hosted by none other than the mighty Punknews.org!  I¹d like to take this chance to thank Punknews for being super rad and presenting these ramblings to their loyal followers. That said, let¹s go over our last 2 days together.

We awoke a little later than expected once more in Roger¹s dad, Brian Harvey¹s, home.  All of the running around to 3 different venues and packing up equipment the previous day had us exhausted.  Today would bring about our last day with our new friends in Tigers Jaw, Kite Party and Three Man Cannon.  All of these bands brought something special to the stage each night and it¹s a bummer that it all came to an end all too quickly.  After packing our things into the van once again, we bid farewell to Brian Harvey and beautiful Erie, PA and made our 6-hour journey to Wilkes Barre, PA.  Most of us, including myself continued to catch up on more sleep until the half-way point where we made a pit stop at a Sheetz station.  I was hungry and stoked to be thereŠ right until I hopped out of the van.  I didn¹t even take a step towards the door when I suddenly remembered that I had left and been forced to cancel my debit card since last night¹s events.  And my last $10 had been spent last night on our trip to Denny¹s.  Therefore in utter self-defeat, I crawled back onto my bench and went back to sleep on an empty stomach.

Luckily, I managed to sleep the rest of the way until we arrived at The Redwood Art Space in Wilkes Barre.  Sleeping half of the day away and hunger had me rather lethargic upon arrival so while the guys played some acoustic guitar and passed a football around, I started to binge on the remaining cans of Red Bull and pita bread we had in the van.  This would prove rather entertaining as the night went on.  I took a quick break to set up our merch in the back corner of the room while the other bands started to load in their equipment.  Soon after, I found out that Tigers Jaw had provided pizza to the bands.  So after merch was set and ready to go, I commenced in stuffing my face with the sweetest pizza I¹ve ever had.  All of this while continuing to down can after can of Red Bull.  By the time the show was under way, kids had started to gather around from all over Wilkes Barre, clogging the room and the parking lot outside. Three Man Cannon and Kite Party tore up the stage once more to an ever-growing audience as I made my way outside to warm up my trumpet.  Heart racing and energy flowing.  Soon after Kite Party, we stormed the tiny stage and began to rage all over it.

Needless to say, the Red Bull got the better of me early on and may or may not have brought about a brown note or two.  But I redeemed myself in my tiny corner space I made for myself with lots of thrashing around and beating the hell out of our extra drums.  The set concluded with 2 pulling out his signature drum fatality and myself hitting a cymbal a little too hard causing it to fall on 2¹s head also causing a domino effect on a nearby empty guitar case which also introduced itself to 2¹s dome. Tyler¹s drum set was no exception and we made sure that it knew who it worked for as we tore it to pieces closing down our set.  If you would take a nice close look at us, you¹d see the bruises we leave on each other sometimes.  Beauty is pain though, right? Or not. Overall the last set with our friends went great and afterwards, we settled down to watch Tigers Jaw tear the stage up to all of their closest friends.

I made my way back to merch still riding high on my Red Bull kick and tried to stay still while chatting with an old Warped Tour friend, Ms. Toni Sheppard.  It¹s always super fantastic running into some of the great folks I met on that mighty tour last summer (while out with Fake Problems).  We continued our chat with 2 outside once the show had ended. Went through the post-tour notions of swapping merch and finally packed everything in the trailer to ready ourselves for our final stop the next day.  After bidding fond farewells to our tour mates, Toni and our temporary roadies/besties, Tony and Carrie, we rounded up into the van to set a course for Philadelphia, PA where we would be staying the night at our friend, Mike Ski¹s house.  Though the journey wasn¹t too long, we were good and ready to settle down into a nice home for the night and get plenty of rest for our final show the next day.  However, not everything went quite as planned.

It would appear that Mike had fallen asleep during the time we were traveling.  It wasn¹t that much of a big deal since we were expecting it. The only problem was that he wasn¹t waking up to answer our calls once we arrived.  So after a few missed calls and knocks at the door we put our things back into the van and decided to kill a little time at the nearby Dunkin Donuts.  Eager to get some snacks, our hearts sank as we approached the 24-hour store, only to find its racks empty of delicious pastries.  So as a last resort, we walked across the street to gather some convenience store snacks instead.  It was getting later and surely Mike was still sound asleep, so in defeat, we crawled back into the van and attempted to settle in for the rest of the night until Mike woke up in the morningŠ though not before having a little fun.

Once we were all settled in, we decided that it would be all in good fun to start sending Mike numerous voicemails while he slept on.  Hilarity ensued as we came up with more and more ridiculous things to tell him about while we tried not to laugh.  Though, it could also be that we were all super tired and delirious that made the moment so funny.  Regardless, I recorded a good 30 minutes of said ridiculousness on my phone and maybe we¹ll post it up on our website if I can edit it down enough and it¹s still funny.  Anyway, as luck would have it, not 10 minutes after we had finally decided to bring the joke to a close, Mike finally called us back and opened up his home to us to finish up resting in.  And after a quick shower, I made my way to a shared room with Roger. To my surprise the next morning, Roger and I were the first ones awake and decided to go down to Dunkin Donuts again for a quick coffee/donut breakfast.  Afterwards, we decided to take a walk down the street to do some quick exploring.  It was there that Roger found a tobacco shop that he wished to stop in to check out some rolling tobacco.  After spending a few minutes there chatting with the manager about our band and such, we began our walk back to Mike¹s since it had started to look a little stormy outside.

We came back to everyone awake and about the house.  Our show wasn¹t for another few hours and close by so we used much of this time to lounge around while Mike started to set up his tattoo station upstairs to give some of the boys some ink.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get stamped this tour again with no available money in my pocket.  However, Chris Stowe was officially inked into White Wives with his new bird tattoo and 2 found some space on his own arm to pay homage to his marriage.  While this was all going on, I used my free time to catch up on e-mails, jam some tunes and relax on my computer.  Once it was finally time to head to the show, we packed up and said our goodbyes to Mike and Josie, and went downtown to a small diner called Teri¹s.

The weather still hadn¹t cleared up much upon arrival, and the rest of the night saw plenty of rain of the Philadelphia skies.  After unpacking, I spent lots of time up until the opening bands, Glory Bound and Night Genius, getting final merch counts from our short week out on the road. After getting all of my numbers nice and organized, I went outside to escape the overhead radio¹s acid rock kick to chat with the guys outside with some of their old friends.  Our set time came about rather quickly after enduring some more heavy downpours outside so we all set up and squeezed together in the tiny space provided for us to play.  This space was probably the tiniest we¹ve had to squeeze into with all 6 of us, but we made the best of it and had ourselves a really great final show.  One more destroyed set up later, and it was decided that we blast off back home to Pittsburgh as soon as we could.

We did just that, and after a long 6-hour drive back, we arrived back at 2¹s house in the early morning hours.  Chris Stowe had decided that he would make his drive back home to Cleveland right after.  So, he took Roger and myself back to Roger¹s house to get a bit more shut eye before 2 would be coming to get us in the morning to unload the trailer back at the practice space.  We heartily saw off Stowe once we arrived and soon after, the sleep was short lived before my phone started ringing with 2 on the other line.  Before we knew it, the rest of the day flew by as we unpacked everything, said our goodbyes to 2 and soon after, Roger accompanied me to the downtown bus stop where I would be taking the bus again to the airport.  It was there that I gave Roger my last goodbye and made my way back to Texas for the remainder of the evening.  Now I¹m here back at home and counting down the days until we¹re all back together again to bring Happeners to the rest of the world.  If all goes well, I hope to see all of you with our dates alongside AWOLNation.  Until then, thank you for tuning into our Punknews Dispatch!  Again, I hope you found the read to be interesting and entertaining.  One more quick thanks to Punknews.org for hosting us and lastly, to everyone that came out to the shows this past week!  We hope to see all of you much sooner than later! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

Love, Josh & White Wives