Joe's Odyssey

Traveling is a muscle:  If you don’t use it, it atrophies and it takes time to reestablish yourself both practically and emotionally around the challenges of going town to town playing music.

It’s been over three months since my last out-of-town performance (a BOA show in Tulsa) and almost four months since my last Odyssey-related travel to Texas and Connecticut in November, so I experienced some travel muscle atrophy on a brief trip to Philadelphia to perform my Odyssey for Classics Day at Germantown…

I awoke in the dark in my hotel room in Connecticut and immediately checked the weather. When I went to sleep there was snow forecast and I was worried that the backroads on the drive to my morning shows would be a problem.  But all that manifested was some negligible rain and I was easily off on the 20 minute drive to The Woodstock Academy to play the last two shows of my ten in ten days in six states run. 

Years ago the 7:30 am start time for the first show would have bothered me but over 350 plus…

I awoke on Tuesday with my manic Monday travel schedule still echoing in my brain and body… but feeling refreshed after just a few hours of sleep. A hotel breakfast, a shuttle ride back to the airport to pick up a rental car, and I was on my way for the hour drive to Pomfret School, a private mostly boarding high school in northeast Connecticut. 

An English teacher at Pomfret runs a class that spends an entire trimester reading and considering the Odyssey… so basically my dream audience. I played there in…

After three days home following my show in West Virginia, I headed back out on a Monday morning for the second part of my ten show run: four Odyssey shows in three days in two states, Texas and Connecticut. 

You might be saying to yourself: “Those states are both nowhere near Illinois and nowhere near one another.” 

And you would be correct. 

This set of shows required me to deploy a level of creative travel planning reminiscent of some of my first extensive touring in 2015. 

It started with a 5:20 am…

For the second straight day I’m on the road in the pre-dawn darkness. 

I’ve got an almost five hours drive from Lexington to Wheeling, West Virginia, where I’ll be performing at The Linsly School, a show that will mark the 45th state in which I’ve performed my Odyssey. 

As the number I need to reach all 50 gets smaller, each new state seems to take on added significance, like a delayed homecoming, and West Virginia is no exception. 

It’s just before noon as I pull into the parking lot of the school, a…