eLIFELIST.com Bike Trip

Ok, so the Smashing Pumpkins are hands down my favorite band and Siamese Dream is my favorite album, wanted to get that out of the way early in this post.  Siamese Dream came out when I was just beginning to find and play music and I have a deep nostalgia for the Smashing Pumpkins.

I saw Zwan play in New York a couple years ago, which was great, at the very least it was Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain playing together and I like a good number of the tracks on that album.

That said, I've never seen SP in concert and it is on my Life-List to see them.  I heard they were getting back together for a new album and tour and had hopes that seeing them wasn’t a lost cause.  I remember being 14 and a couple of my friends were going to the Lollapalooza tour the Smashing Pumpkins played in and I was so pissed I couldn't go. Now that I'm older I of course understand my folks hesitation to let me go to a huge rock festival at that age.

The battle for the tickets was pretty intense.  The deal is that they are playing 9 residence shows in Asheville North Carolina to kick off their US tour.  They are playing at The Orange Peel, which is a venue that holds about 950 people.  The tickets were set to go on sale this past Sunday May 20th at 1PM EST.  I was online, credit card in hand at 12:50 ready to put my ecommerce quick check out skills to work.  At 1PM TicketWeb.com came to a screeching halt and trying to get through to purchase tickets was a joke.  I wasn’t sure if it was my connection or if other people were getting tickets ahead of me.  I stomped and huffed like a little kid that just lost his Ice cream scoop to the ground. 

To make a long self-indulgent story short, TicketWeb’s servers crashed hard and later that night they announced the tickets would be sold on Ticketmaster.com the next day, Monday.  I was there again at 7PM Monday, burned through check out and got 2.  All 9 shows sold out in under an hour. 

It’s great that we will be able to see them on the trip and check that one off the list.  We are going to have to seriously haul it to get to Asheville by the 5th.

Yes, slightly, but that's how we roll.  We've bumped up our departure one month for the Bike Trip,  now planning to leave from North Carolina the beginning of July, finishing up in San Francisco the first of September.  Preparing the trip by then is going to be quite intense.

Nailing down the mileage and route is proving to be difficult but exciting to see where we'll be riding.  There are a million things that need to fall into place, ok maybe 1,000 is a more accurate number.

More exciting eLIFELIST.com news to be announced soon.

I can't deny my home state.  The Lincoln Highway just looked so straight forward and easy, that was the problem.  We've gone back to thinking we'll start in North Carolina again, and 99% sure we'll start there.  We'll still end up in San Fran.  It just seemed too easy to do the Lincoln Highway (famous last words).  We want to do something a bit different.  The plan (for now) is to ride across NC then head north through Kentucky and up through Nebraska, then Colorado, Moab Utah, Salt Lake, The Sierras and then on to San Francisco. 

Starting in North Carolina makes me more excited about the route, I'm really looking forward to riding across the state I grew up in. 

Brent and I had a long conversation on the phone today about tackling the trip.  It's difficult to not get bogged down in all the details of it, but I think it will be that much more fun when everything's laid out.  I'm all about some spontaneity but I like to have deadlines and guidelines too, especially when we establish them. 

We've been hitting the web pretty hard to research what the best things are to do and see on the trek.  If you know of anything we should see or do along our route please send us a message biketrip@elifelist.com  We plan on stopping at a lot of college, Wake Forest being one in particular.