The Hula Girls set out on a three-stop tour this past weekend! We started off at our home-base in Costa Mesa, CA and headed out to Laughlin, Palm Springs, and Lake Tahoe! Here's a slideshow of some of our experiences on the road.
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| We don't get out on the road much, so we needed to rent a van and trailer for the trip. A much bigger trailer than we really needed... But we were bringing all three girls and a ton of merch. California state law says that maximum speed limit while pulling a trailer is 55mph. Ever drive 600+ miles at 55mph? It's annoyingly slow. |
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We wrangled up our go-go girls in Riverside county at Audrie's house
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| Somewhere out on Route 66, we came up on this odd water oasis. Flamingos and water nymphs... |
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| The festival promoters put us up at the Aquarius hotel and casino where the festival was located. The buffet wasn't all that impressive, but they did include two beers and this amazing desert selection. Christian, Shorty, and I all made money in the casino that night! |
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| I combined the best two parts of the buffet. |
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| Shorty and I decided to go explore some of vintage Laughlin. From the the era of Las Vegas theming, the owners of Circus Circus built and opened the Colorado Belle in 1979. |
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| We also went and visited the Pioneer hotel and gambling hall. While I thought the place had surely been open since the 1950s, it turns out that again, the hotel was built in 1979. Some amazing western theming in this place! You may recognize 'River Rick' as the cigarette-puffing cowboy brother to Fremont Street's 'Vegas Vic'. |
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| Some great vintage slot machines. It's a shame that they don't use these anymore. We figured that it's probably because it is too easy to mechanically cheat them. |
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| More great vintage slot machines. This was the golden era of slot design! Much better than that Ellen (yeah, DeGeneres) video slot that I kept seeing all weekend. |
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| Meanwhile, back at our hotel, the girls were being served tequila by some psycobilly bartender. When at 'trop rock' festival, I guess you drink tequila. Tiki events, it's rum. I prefer the latter. |
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| The next day (Thurs), was show time! As festival attendees began arriving, Shorty and I discovered that 'trop rockers' decorate their doors in a caribbean kinda theme with party city stuff. I enjoyed seeing that, it was amusing. Lots of pirate stuff too. Pretty funny. |
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| See! Pirate stuff. The girls are scared of pirates. |
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| Just before showtime in the ballroom. We were supposed to play the pool, but it was a crazy wind storm out there. The ballroom treated us just fine anyway. |
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| The Hula Girls live very firmly in tiki-land, but let me tell you, these 'trop rock' fans were amazing! We would love to play this festival again. Non-stop dancing all night long! And the older folks in the crowd loved that we played some Ventures and Duane Eddy stuff! Our whole band loved performing for them! |
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| A couple of encores and we wrapped it up after playing for about two hours! |
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| The girls always get us to take these 'after the show' group photos.... and I'm glad they do. Otherwise, we'd just run off to go gamble or enjoy some cocktails. |
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| After the show, it was off to more drinking and late-nite breakfast with the girls. |
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| The next morning, we hit the road for Palm Springs to play the Tiki Caliente festival! Route 66 sure has a lot of rad and bizarre roadside stuff going on. We were only on that road for a second, but we did come across this brightly painted building with wagon wheels and rooftop buffalo. |
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| There was this too... |
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...And a giant concrete turtle.
Stay tuned for our stop in Palm Springs! |
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