Day 4: Six Pieces of Bacon

August 20, 2007
By Jamie

The family/friends/memory lane portion of the trip is drawing to a close. Genny and BJ actually live in a town northwest of KC called Farley. It’s about 240 people, so it’s a nice peaceful setting. They’ve got two kids, but they were in bed by the time we got home from the game, so the only time I saw them was in the morning when they came into my room to say goodbye. (In fact, Rick and Tangela have four kids that they had ditched for the previous evening, so we didn’t see them at all. It’s almost like people don’t want their children exposed to us…) After a good night’s rest and a casual morning we hit the road for St. Louis. We took a brief (relative term) stop in Columbia, MO to have some lunch, peruse the U of M campus and post the previous days’ blog entries. (Still slacking on getting the photos up.)

Eventually we found our way to Waterloo, IL, which is about 25 minutes southeast of St. Louis. Again, we are greeted with wonderful hospitality. Craig’s cousin Cathy and her husband Steve take great care of us. Cathy cooks up a storm. Cathy also happens to be Makeready’s #1 fan and we’re notified early on that we’ll be served six pieces of bacon as long as we play “Grandma’s Farm” a few times.

Cathy and Steve’s children and grandchildren all live nearby, so they came and went most of the evening. Our kid-free stretch is over. It got to be a bit of a madhouse with the lil’ screamers, but that’s OK. The only drawback is that a couple of the folks we had hoped to play music with got tied up in parental duties. There are some really talented folks in this family. Regardless, after dinner we got into some pickin’ and had a grand time. Dave sat in for a while. I would have been content to listen to him play. He can really make the guitar and mandolin sing. We were also joined by Vitor. He’s a Brazilian native who play’s some foreign-ey named instrument. It’s basically a Brazilian version of a ukulele and it mixed in very nicely. Thankfully we had solved half the world’s problems in our late night discussions on Saturday with Rick and Tangela, and the other half on Sunday night with Genny and BJ. Monday night was about music. The session actually turns into a bit of a marathon and Craig and I played for about four hours until bedtime at 1:00. Cathy got to hear several takes of Grandma’s Farm and we were in turn rewarded with bacon in the morning.