the postal service, larabars, country princess, all-night drives

eek! so much going on. many, many things.... all happening at once.

the new cd arrived to my house on jan 19. the tees came jan 20. i was leaving (did leave) for the european tour on jan 21. this meant that i was up until the wee-est hours of the morning, preparing pre-order packages. this is what that looked like, egads.





if you pre-ordered, you should have received your package by now... if you haven't, please email me right away!

the following day, very bleary-eyed, i hopped a plane. i wrote a blog about hopping planes and crossing oceans but now it seems like forever ago so i won't post it.

oh, one very exciting thing before i forget.
as some of you may know, i was diagnosed last year with a bizarre food allergy. as food allergies go, it could be worse (celiac would be very hard for me) but it's pretty freaking annoying. i'm allergic to balsam of peru (google it) and it's a food & fragrance thing. basically it means that when i'm on tour, it's a pain in the ass to eat food on-the-go because, um, about 89% of all things pre-packaged are no longer kosher for me to eat.

enter my snack saviors, the good folks at LARABAR. LARABARS are all-natural fruit and nut (and chocolate!) bars that have zero-added-anything, which is what i need (because i can't eat even natural additives like vanilla, lemon juice, cinnamon.... it's a real pain). basically I wrote them an email, explaining my food allergy and i told them how we were going to be tour this whole year, promoting the new album, and i asked if they would be interested in sponsoring me... and they did! so now i am armed with a truckload of LB's to keep my well-fed while i am on the road. you should check them out, they are amazing.

here's our tour car, sporting the only two stickers necessary to our lives:



and here i am, happily eating my LB's on the road....while manuel keeps his eyes on the road (and rightfully so):





and here i am again, happily refusing mcdonald's in favor of my larabar!


let's see, what else....
we have been on tour in italy about a week and the shows have been amazing. despite the frigid weather and the constant rain, we've had a really great turnout at all the shows, and our album has been "record of the week" on both Contraradio (Firenze) and Radio Onda d'Urto (Brescia), plus it was featured on Radio Sherwood of Padova AND it was featured on Radio RAI 3 (Italy's NPR). Not bad for one week!
Plus we played at some of our favorite venues, including Gruppo Tetris of Trieste, where I am happy to say they consider me folk royalty:



last night we drove home from milano at 2 am... as in we left milano at 2 am... and rolled into the driveway at 7:30 am. that was pretty nuts. but the show was amazing and so was manuel, who clearly has a career as a truck driver if music does not work out for us.

lastly, thanks to mr. olney over at heartache with hardwork, who gave us our first review... and it's a FANTASTIC ONE!!

okay, i gotta run.. 14 minutes until the next departure and i can't find my warm boots... and it's snowing outside... this is italy, folks?? mah.

xoxoxo and thanks for reading.
love
vanessa