Hey guys!!!! I have to apologize…I’ve been a little lazy with blogging lately, duh, but A LOT has happened since Michigan!!

After the Annie Blazer instrument was found (phew) we drove all those hours to Louisville, Kentucky, making up funny games in gas stations along the way. We arrived and immediately hit up a party, because we are 24-7 DTP, yo. The party was a nice little barbeque at Sean Netzer’s house, who is Amanda’s really good friend and #1 on my list! Sean made the Bachelorettes all special burgers, yummmm, he knows the way to my heart! After that, we arrived at the bar where we would be playing at, which was called the Rudyard Kipling. It was a really cute little place with pillow seating and lots of neat artwork. Before our set, there was a dinner theater production in the venue area, and it was called ‘Putting the F back in Art’, which we all thought was pretty funny (regressed minds!!!). We played an awesome show that night, even though only like ten people showed up, most of them being our friends. Nonetheless, we played ‘the best show ever’ and everyone in the audience was smiling the whole time! Following our best show was this crazy guitar guy named Will Owen Gage who was really crazy good, and played some songs with his dad, John Gage, and then our pal who worked at the bar danced a lot, he was cool. Ahaha. All while this was happening, Annie was chilling with some new friends and me and Amanda and Lizzie were hanging with some old friends outside! It was really fun. After that was over, we went back to spend the night at Lizzie’s pals house, had fun chilling with their weird cat, let in DTP Annie when she came home in the morning, and then hit the road the next rainy morning to our next stop….St. Louis…MY HOME!!!

The whole drive there I was so anxious, I really couldn’t wait to be in my own house for the first time in WEEKS! When we finally arrived to the gateway to the west (also the gateway to other things…), me and Amanda decided to give Annie and Lizzie a little tour of our beloved city, St. Louis Missouri! We passed by downtown through the highway and saw the Arch of course, and then went through to show them all the wonders of Forest Park, complete with the grand basin fountains and all the pretty museums. We passed by our old house and our synagogue, and finally arrived on our street. It was so great to see my parents, everyone was so happy!!!!!!! Everyone took a ‘nice rest’, discussed a weird nosed piñata, and then we had dinner of St. Louis style pizza with my sister Nicky and my cousin Danny and our parents Dennis and Laura. Now it was time for our Edwardsville, Illinois show!! Which by the way was ALSO THE BEST SHOW EVER!!!!!!!!! We got to the venue after driving for a long while and practicing our vocals in the tiger van. The place was called The Stagger Inn and was pretty dank. As usual our outfits were lookin sassy, I wore the golden dress! At the show, a whole bunch of our friends showed up, but most importantly, Joel and Nick, who attended our VERY first show all the way back in Jackson.  Nick made a special guest appearance during the Special Passenger song and Joel did his Gummy Bears song!! Everyone had a blast, and people got up and started dancing when we played ‘Facebook’! What a great time. To top it all off, the bands that played after us were really awesome too! After us was a sibling folk duo called the Hathaways who blended harmonies with guitar plucking and their cool Peruvian instrument to make beautiful folky stuff! I approved, I love sibling duo bands. After them was the long awaited set of Japanese Bat Bomb, formerly known as Cat Jump, who were playing their very last farewell show!!!!!! This was an amazing time, they played for nearly two hours and everyone was dancing the whole time!!! The Japanese Bat Bomb show was the most DTP moment of the whole tour, even though at times we stopped being DTP to play the shuffle board icy thing, where me and Nicky were against Nick and Annie (who won anyway, I forgot?) and besides, I was getting really anxious because my twin HANNAH had gotten home that night from GERMANY and I needed to see her stat!!!! But we stayed in Edwardsville for a really long time anyways because the bar took a really long time distributing the money to the bands at the end, so we ended up sitting outside eating animal fruit snacks for who knows how long! When we got home I saw Hannah for the first time in three weeks, which is the longest that we’ve ever been apart, and I was so happy to see her, we talked until 5:30 in the morning because we just had SO much to catch up on! Germany seemed awesome, I’m so glad she had a great experience.

The next day we ate some bagels and then headed out to the nursing home where my grandpa Irv lives to play him a mini set of the Bachelorettes! It was probably the most awesome thing we did all tour. He was really glad to see us play, and even though we only did about five songs without a pickup on the guitar or Amanda’s drums, we made SO many people happy! Even though we had only come to play for our grandpa, a whole bunch of old people and nurses and even this repair guy came into the room and listened and danced, too! Our favorite was this old lady in sunglasses who played the egg shaker to all our songs and told us that we can do anything if we try!!!!! She was great. All in all it was a very emotional experience and we were so proud of what we did.

That afternoon was spent getting ready for our house show in my backyard! It was a potluck BBQ and we had set out a lot of lawn chairs and borrowed a PA from our friends the Bashkins and were ready to get the party started. IT WAS CRAZY! So many people came, from all points of me and Amanda’s lives. Her college and high school friends, my current high school friends, members from all sides of our family were there, whoa there were some people that came that I didn’t even know! Even though all of this was very overwhelming, that didn’t stop us from putting on a spectacular show, complete with some Lizzie Wright Super Spaceship (PIE FOR COMPUTER) and a just okay Dubb Nubb set (hey, we had just been reunited!) complete with an accident curse word in front of a baby cousin. The Bachelorettes played and everyone was really impressed!!! It was pretty different, being our first outdoor show, but all in all we were pretty happy with how the show went, but even more happy with the secret that Lizzie told us in my bedroom!! Once again we hung out with our pals Joel and Nick (their third show!!) and even Sean came and a whole bunch of other pals! ALL MY FRIENDS WERE THERE TOO! They rule, and are DTP and ay okay! After Joel tried on all the wigs, it was time for everyone to go home and for the Bachelorettes to get a nice sleep, which was much needed, let me tell you. We live some crazy lifestyle on tour.

Amanda made some frittata thing in the morning for us all to eat with hotdogs, and then we packed up our tiger van, (including my twin sister!!!) and hit the road to meet up with Joel and Nick in the loop, which is this strip of shops and restaurants in St. Louis where all the cool kids go, duh. When we arrived, we got cream sodas from Fitz’s and Joel gave us some weird candy as presents from his cargo pockets. Ahhaha. We all went shopping A LOT and I bought a WIZARD! We had funny conversations and ate cheap Chinese food and decided that we better get on the highway to Columbia, Missouri because we had a show coming up!!! And it wasn’t just going to be any old show……it was going to be the last show on tour with me : (

Columbia is an awesome college town with a bunch of fun shops and stuff that we explored as soon as we got there! We met up with Josh Parshall’s awesome little sister and all enjoyed some delicious Sparky’s ice cream, with such flavors as pineapple upside down cake and poop cherry stuff Hannah got, hahah. While Annie read some weird comic book about the last man on earth, all of us crazy kids ran around Columbia purchasing many things such as a train hat, crazy colored/patterend shorts, and a BUBBLE SWORD!!! We all hung out in the commonground area of campus by the ancient columns still standing there, and Lizzie and the guys played some Frisbee troll game, and me and Hannah played pretty ukulele tunes. We met up with MY DAD and Amanda’s best pal from college, Alisha, for a lovely dinner at this restaurant Flatbranch, where many delicious mashers were eaten, scary hand driers were discussed, and many iPhones were bumped.

MY LAST SHOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! was at this place called Café Berlin, which is the cutest breakfast and lunch and coffee place, full of cute artwork all over the walls and even silly signs on the door saying ‘NO DINOSAURS ALLOWED’ which made me sad, ahahhha. Many friends showed up, such as Amanda’s pal Kyle Cook and even the cool dude that sold us the bubble sword! I know I may have said it before that previous shows were the best show ever…but for me this was the VERY VERY best show ever!!!!!! For one thing, Super Spaceship played EXCELLENT and I even harmonized a few songs and danced a lot!!! Dubb Nubb played an almost FLAWLESS set and got everyone in good spirits!!! Of course not in as good spirits as when Joel did the Gummy Bears song and me and Nick did the dance moves and Hannah made bubbles in the background with the bubble sword! It was magical. In my floral tube top dress from the ‘80s, the Bachelorettes came on and played, yes you guessed it, the best show ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We had so much fun and at the end I got emotional because it was just such a sad thing to be finally done with one of the best experiences of my whole life. It’s been really hard not being on tour anymore, all I want to do is be DTP with my best friends Amanda and Annie and Lizzie every single day.

Hannah was silly and locked the keys in the car, so after the Columbia show we had to stay at Café Berlin for another hour or so, waiting for the tow guy to come get it out. Some people got cranky, but some people just had fun singing folk songs and reminiscing on tails and nipps. You think we had enough of that Berlin place, but after sleeping at Jordan Parshall and Kyle Cook’s houses, we came back there in the morning for a lovely goodbye breakfast with all our friends and our Dad! Saying goodbye to my band-mates was the hardest thing of the whole tour.

I am sitting here at my home in St. Louis writing this blog, and I have to tell everyone that I really really wish I were writing this blog on mini computer in the tiger van, racing down highways of America with my sister and new sisters, headed off to new adventures while eating beef jerky hearts, thinking of a mustache, screaming the lyrics to ‘Hurricane’ by Mike Regardless, and laughing and laughing. There was no other way I would’ve wanted to spend my summer of my seventeenth year. To the friends and places and memories and music we fell in love with along the way, Summer Tour 2009, we will miss you forever. Peace out girl scout.

- Delia ‘god made me shiny so let me shine’ Rainey