May 11th, 2003
The Creepy Crawl
St. Louis, Missouri

Bands: Once a Hero, Downstate.

We woke up bright and early in Toledo for the long drive to St. Louis. Some early morning thunderstorms cleared out to make way for some cooler, fresher air. And it was windy. We had no idea what we were in for. For much of the drive, there were crosswinds in excess of 30 miles an hour, which makes driving a top-heavy, high-profile van like Annabelle hell.

Luckily, there were no mishaps as we trecked our way across Indiana and Illinois. All the signs like the one above say "Indiana: Crossroads of America." I think they should change it to "Indiana: That state you always have to drive across when you're trying to get from somewhere to somewhere else." No, seriously, though, we have no problem with Indiana, even if the weather there tried to kill us.

A few hours later, we rolled across the Mississippi River into St. Louis to the tune of Nelly's "You can find me in St. Louis..."

We had a little time to kill when we got there so we walked around downtown St. Louis for a bit. There's the arch, and some other building we didn't bother to find out what it was.

Here's the Creepy Crawl where we played our show. The venue was pretty sweet and had plenty of character, the walls plastered with more stickers and posters than a lot of clubs can boast. There were actually two shows this evening; we were in the earlier one.

The first band was called Downstate, playing straight-up rock and roll from southern Illinois. They were nice guys and we were glad to have met them. We were the second (and last) band. We've played better shows, but we've played worse ones, too. It probably seemed worse to us because Alex and Doug played the entire show with brutal headaches and hoarse voices, and there were a few technical difficulties with the guitars. We did get some decent pics, though, so here you go. Tommorrow we're hitting up the Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas, where we played last year. 'Til then.

-Once a Hero