June 21 - Cam's cousin's house, Houston, TX

I haven't had internet connection for a couple days, so this might be a long update. The last 36 hours have been absolutely insane. 

On Friday night we played at a venue called The King Of Clubs in Claremore, Oklahoma. (Claremore is a suburb of Tulsa, and they're obsessed with Will Rogers. The whole county is named after the guy.) We played with two AWESOME bands called The Last Slice (ska) and Kicktree (old school pop punk). According to the local guys, there is a sadly nonexistant punk scene in Oklahoma, and those two bands are pretty much the only ones left. So there weren't that many people at the show, but the ones who were there were awesome. I think they might have even liked our bands. The crowd even "THREW THEIR MOTHERFUCKIN HANDS UP!" during the Sharks song "Degenerate" haha. 

The Sharks playing in Claremore

After the show, we had to get on the road right away because we had an off day that we wanted to spend in Houston at the beach. For those of you who don't know, it's a 12 hour drive from Claremore to Houston. 12 hours. At night. All in one trip. But first we needed Pizza Hut.

We went to Pizza Hut with the Last Slice and Kicktree fellows and their friends. We all ate a ton, but Ryan got the prize for "Most Incredible Display of Gluttony" when he ate so much pizza that he threw up. Seriously. 

After saying goodbye to our new friends, we hit the road. We're actually playing with those guys again in a few days so we'll have more Claremore stories soon.

To recap, it was now midnight, and we were just beginning a 12 hour drive.

The plan was for us to sleep during the van ride, and have  Cody take over the driving for Anthony about halfway there. Unfortunately it's very hard to sleep in a cramped van. We kept the vibes high by playing this new game called Party Lights. Whenever the vibes got too low inside the van, Anthony would turn on the interior lights and crank up the music for about a minute at a time and we would all automatically go WILD. It started with just dancing inside the van and yelling a lot, but a few Party Lightses later, Cody was on the ground with his pants pulled down telling me to take a picture of his ass and send it to all our friends. As gross as that sounds, the Party Lights were on so it seemed right! I think people really enjoyed that picture message on their phones.

I can't really speak for anyone else, but I think I got about two or three hours of sleep in the van. Anthony had decided that he wanted to try to go the distance by himself, but about an hour outside of Houston he said he was feeling the sleep deprivation effects BAD and finally let Cody take over. This was around 11 AM. Driving 11 hours in the dark in the middle of the night after playing a show was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Congrats to Anthony. 

Cody did an admirable job driving the last hour or so, but Anthony still couldn't sleep. He had to make sure we got to our destination of the amazing, sunny, beautiful beach safely. We did! We were so excited to FINALLY get to the beach that we forgot that we had all slept, at most, 3 hours in the last 24. 

It was 95 degrees and very sunny at the beach. We spent time frolicking, throwing a football around, and laying on the beach for about 4 hours. JUST enough time for all of us to get horribly sunburnt. Scott's is the worst, followed by Ryan. Mine is pretty bad too, but it was worth the pain to be able to hang out at a beach for a day.

After the beach we went to stay at Cameron's cousin's house. They have an amazing pool in their backyard, and an even more amazing substance called Aloe Vera that we gladly used to make our sunburns feel better for about 13 seconds. They also made us a real meal, which we were very thankful for. By 10 o clock we were all so dead that we just went to sleep on the floor. So, if my math is correct, we went close to 34 hours and only slept for around 3 of them. The human body isn't supposed to do that. 

I woke up here with no voice for some reason. We're playing a show in San Antonio tonight. I hope I can sing.

More updates soon

-Joe