Free Breakfast
A memoir in two breakfasts
There’s a certain kind of education you only get from touring in your twenties. Not the kind that comes with a degree or a career path, but the kind that comes from sleeping on strangers’ floors, spliting $17.13 at the door five ways, and figuring out how to keep a van moving across a continent on pure stubbornness and youthful optimism.
For almost ten years, I toured across Canada and the US in The High Dials. We’d load up our blue Dodge Ram Bell Canada van (christened Bernadette, after the Four Tops song) and just go. Every time we’d pile in, someone (usually, me) would start singing “Bernadette!” It became a ritual.
One particular tour from 2005 stands out. The plan was ambitious even by our standards: a full cross-Canada run to Vancouver, then down the coast to Los Angeles, where our drummer Robb Surridge would fly home to Montreal for his wedding The rest of us woud dead-head home from LA to Montreal. Somehow, in our minds, this made complete sense.
We broke down in Thunder Bay then hours later in Sault Ste. Marie before we’d even made it out of Ontario.
It was a long weekend. The garages were all closed. We were stranded for three days at a hotel near a smokestack that reminded me of Sauron’s eye. It quite literally felt like Mordor. We had to cancel a bunch of shows and watched our tour calendar shrink. When Bernadette was finally fixed, we looked at the map and decided we could still make it. So, we kept going.
We almost made it to Calgary before the muffler started giving out. Seven in the morning, driving through the night, we pulled into a place called Mr. Muffler, which felt cosmically appropriate, given that we’d already visited a Mr. Transmission in both Tbay and the Sault. We parked and waited for it to open.
I was starving. There was nothing around… just empty parking lots, and across the street, a Holiday Inn with a sign on the window: Free Breakfast.
I turned to Robb. “Come with me. Just follow my lead.”
We walked in, said good morning to the receptionist, and proceeded straight to the dining room. We ate. Went back to the van. I remember thinking: I can’t believe that worked! We had no money. There was nowhere else to eat. And it had just…. worked. I felt like I’d discovered some fundamental law of the universe.
We made it to our show in Vancouver and then toured our way down to LA where Robb flew home. It was just 4 of us left with a van and about 4000km between us and Montreal. We left on a Monday afternoon. We’d make it home Thursday. Two drivers rotating, no stops, just road.
I learned many things on this long trip home about myself and survival. One of them was that if you paid for gas at the pump, they didn’t check your credit card limit. My card was maxed out. The tank kept getting filled. We had the fuel situation handled.
By Denver, I’d conviced myself we were almost home. It felt like we’d been going uphill the whole way and Denver was the peak. It was all downhill to Montreal from there. This is the kind of math your brain does when you haven’t slept in two days and have no other options.
We were somewhere in the middle of the country one early morning when the hunger hit again. I spotted a Ramada Inn just off the highway with a sign: Free Breakfast.
“I got an idea,” I told the guys. “Just follow me.”
The parking lot was nearly empty… two cars, maybe three. Before we went in, I looked at the room numbers. “If anyone asks,” I said, “we’re in room 113.”
Nobody was at the desk. We made a beeline for the dining room, sat down, and started eating.
Then Eric Dougherty, our keyboard player, said he had to use the bathroom. I stopped him. “Room 113. If anyone asks for your key card, you forgot it in the room .” He nodded and went.
He came back looking rattled. He’d run into the receptionist. He recited the script perfectly and the guy just said okay.
Just then the bearded, burly, spectacled receptionist came into the dining room.
“Good morning, gentlemen.” He looked us over. We looked pretty rough… two, maybe three days without real sleep. “Which room are y’all in?” Not sure if he had a drawl… but I remember it that way.
“One thirteen,” we all said in unison.
“Great. Could I just see your room keys?”
“Forgot mine in the room.”
“Mine too.”
“Same here.”
“Uh…. Same?”
He looked at us for a moment. Then: “Okay. Thank you.” And left.
We kept eating… perhaps a little faster than before.
He came back a minute later.
“I’ve done called the police. They’re gonna be here in two minutes. You better not be.”
With that, we got up and headed for the exit. Robbie was still eating his cereal on the way out. We piled into Bernadette in silence. Trevor, our singer, stared out the window for a long moment. "I feel dirty," he said. Nobody disagreed.
Fool me once.