Daytona In The Spring, But Not On Break

I never did the traditional "Spring Break trip" in college so it is fun to visit some of the popular Spring Break locations on tour. Since we don't usually play these places during the prime break times, there are fewer drunken idiots to deal with. The latest popular Spring Break town we played was Daytona Beach.

We stayed in a resort right on the beach, which was nice. (Staying on the beach that is, not the resort!)

You can't really beat the proximity to the beach!


Apparently one can drive their car on the beach in Daytona which means that one can also get their car stuck in the sand in Daytona!


At least the resort had fun neon.

The road that runs closest to the beach with all the resorts is loaded with fun kitchy stuff!

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Superior to sleeping in a cardboard box?

Beauty and the Beast played at the Peabody Auditorium. The Peabody Auditorium is aptly titled since it definitely feels like playing in a nice high school's auditorium!

A Visit From Jim And Jeremy

No tour visit to Florida would be complete without making my friends Jim and Jeremy drive out of their way to come see my show. With Beauty and the Beast the out of the way location was Daytona Beach. Actually Jim and Jeremy live in Orlando so the drive to Daytona was not so bad for them. They saw the show Monday night and then spent the night in Daytona so that we could hang out the next day.

We could not come up with anything very exciting to do in Daytona Beach itself so we drove a little south to the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse.

I am not exactly a lighthouse buff, but the Ponce de Leon is the tallest lighthouse in Florida. Visitors can pay to climb a million stairs to the top so of course we did!

The views were quite nice.

Looking towards Daytona Beach.

Sunrise On Daytona Beach

Fort Myers

After driving from Baton Rouge to Fort Myers (sigh) with a stopover in Tallahassee, we arrived on Tuesday for a week long engagement. This was my second time in Fort Myers. Fort Myers was my fourth tour stop on The Wedding Singer, and was also the site of my 100th show on that tour. I have many happy memories of playing Fort Myers with The Wedding Singer so it was interesting to return two years later with a different show. I have to say that I enjoyed myself, but I spent much of my time reliving my memories of that show.

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Obviously the appeal of a place like Fort Myers for the average person is the proximity to the beach. I am not a huge fan of going to the beach. Body image issues aside, I do not enjoy really hot weather, and I just get bored really quickly. I did go to the beach once (coincidentally to the exact same spot as I went two years ago), and that was enough. Having crossed that off the list, my other extracurricular activities involved reliving my Wedding Singer experience. For Beauty and the Beast we stayed in a different hotel, so one day I walked out past our Wedding Singer hotel on the way to the mall. It may not sound like much, but it was a pleasant reminder of the beginning of my life as a touring musician.

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Interestingly the one thing that I did not really find the time to do was take many pictures. So I really only have pictures of the Barbara B Mann Performing Arts Hall. Oh well!

This is my favorite type of palm tree.

This time around I walked through the campus of Edison State College where the Mann Hall is located. It isn't really very interesting.


Well I approve of two of the three.


The front side of the theatre is really difficult to photograph due to all the fauna.

Keeping with my theme of not getting any pictures in Fort Myers, these are the only two I got inside the Barbara B Mann. I learned a valuable lesson about having my battery charged on my last day in Fort Myers. (Sigh!) At least it is not a beautiful old theatre.

The highlight of the week though was a visit from Glenn and Gwen. It is always nice to have guests in the audience.

Baton Rouge...At Least We Had A Different Hotel

What to say about playing Baton Rouge a second time? Well we did not have a golden day in which to go visit New Orleans. We played more performances, but the theatre is still an exercise in blandness. It gave me a bit more time to explore downtown, not that there is anything there to be discovered. The only real difference was that we stayed in a much nicer hotel.

Radisson Hotels are sometimes hit or miss. As we pulled up to this hotel, I figured that we had a miss on our hands. Sure the building itself was very retro and painted to accentuate the cool retroness, but I figured that was just a facade to hide the horrors of the rooms inside. I was wrong. The hotel had the feel of a hip boutique hotel. The rooms were decorated in a fun modern style, and the bathrooms had those showers which shoot water at you from the entire length of the wall and from above just for good measure. In fact to took me forever just to figure out which knobs controlled which jets of water!

The rest of my Baton Rouge experience was not much different than my experience on The Wizard of Oz. As I looked through my pictures, I had deja vu. You probably will too!

The Old Court House was still old.

Downtown still only had a handful of places to eat. Although we did have very tasty pizza between shows and the most amazing dessert bread knots one can imagine!

The theatre was still boring.

Oh well. Not every tour stop is going to be exciting. At least we were in a cool hotel with no bed bugs!