Day 5: Ōtautahi
Welcome
Yesterday we played in Ōtautahi, and I recorded my 500th tour breakfast.
In order to celebrate an important milestone this blog post will be exactly 500 words long.
No one knows when the blog began. It must have been two years ago, at least, perhaps even longer. All we know is that Breakfast and Travel Updates began 499 posts ago as a write-home service for members of the tour party, a way to keep the mothers and fathers continually updated on our well-being and whereabouts. Tens of tours and hundreds of breakfasts later this website has developed into a much longer-form write-home service for the members of our tour party, but more importantly has become a platform for me to spread my agenda, a message taking the form of cringeworthy alliteration and photos of buildings and bridges taken on a phone camera that is begging to be put into retirement. I began this publication hoping to develop skills as a writer and looking back at my first blog post I should say that I have made some progress in this field, even if I treat semicolons like they grow on trees. The words are running out, though, and I should get to the business of the day.
I reported to Jon and Liz’s motel room at the scheduled breakfast time. Tristan handed me a champagne flute of orange juice and a coffee. There was an electric frypan deployed and several people crowded along the kitchenette, huddled around some kind of food preparation that demanded care and attention. Several minutes later my 500th breakfast was served to me, a creation that deserves a suitably tropical name for a sandwich created from the toppings of a Hawaiian Pizza.
A grilled slice of pineapple was the star of the show, and the fruit slab had been augmented with an inserted star of ham steak, and then perfectly grilled. A fried egg disc was placed atop the fruit and Mozzarella cheese was melted underneath, and finally a pizza sauce was slathered upon one of the buns to bring all these bold flavours together. This was not a spur of the moment creation – my bandmates had developed this brand new breakfast food well in advance, getting together a week beforehand and test driving the first batch of Hawaiian Breakfast Muffins at dinner.
I want to thank my friends for the continued support in this endeavour. You are incredible humans who I am privileged to share the joys of touring and music making with. I love you all madly.
The remainder of the day was a blur that I experienced hazily in my post-pineapple bliss. Our flight to Christchurch was short and violent, but beautifully handled by the flight crew. We loaded into a beautiful stone church-turned pub and set up the fish in a precarious location. The show was much rowdier than a Thursday would have predicted, and suffered a short power failure, but was a typically great Christchurch Beths gig, no surprises there.
