Mutual friends introduced us. “You should meet this couple we met! They both play music and travel in an RV with an insane amount of music gear. You’d love them!” So we first got together with Rod and Tanya at their home in Egan SD in 2016, and love them we did! That was our first year out on the road and we learned so much from them about RVing, traveling with music gear, and making music. Mentors! We were humbled that these pro musicians, traveling as RVDreamTour, invited us to jam with them. We were fortunate to cross paths again later that year, in one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever played music in, and once again in 2019.
When we first met, Rod and Tanya were able to work remotely while traveling for months at a time. Although they still do that, their latest work situation requires them to occasionally be on site at several places in the west. They still spend summers in Egan, but winters now in St David, AZ which is nearer to the work sites. We checked in from Palm Springs, when we were about to be heading towards St David and – surprise! – they were in Bakersfield, CA. Well, that’s not very far from Palm Springs, is it? Set a course!
Tanya handles all of the technology for an egg production company with several locations. We met up on a weekend at Rosemary Farms, where Rod and Tanya have a site set up for their RV with room for us to squeeze in, too. After catching up properly– it’d been 6 years! – we learned about chickens and eggs and an astonishing amount of associated technology. In addition to the usual computer and network gear common to most any business operation – office work, finance and logistics, etc. – the farming operation itself is fully automated! The female chicks are raised with lights and stimulation so that they learn when it’s time to eat and where to lay their eggs. Some of the birds live in open chicken houses – pasture raised – while others live in barns in a more traditional chicken setting with controlled access to the outside. Doors open and close at certain times in particular sequence, the proper feed is distributed at specific times to the appropriate places, conveyor belts remove chicken waste for processing into fertilizer and take eggs to be inspected, sorted, and moved to a processing/packing facility where trucks are loaded for distribution and delivery. Everything is controlled and monitored, all the barns, storage and processing facilities are as online as any of the offices, and all of that is managed by Tanya. But not on the weekend!
For the weekend, we spent coffee time, lunchtime, breaks and – of course – happy hour in our camp chairs alongside the RVs with a nice view of the chicken farming operations. We caught each other up on comings and goings over the past 6 years, traded stories, RV sagas, tech tricks and music gear discoveries, plus some more chicken info, attempted to solve world hunger problems, and of course planned our jam time.
Our hosts have access to a large, high-bay workspace outside the company offices, unused on the weekend. There, we set up to play with Tanya on keys and Rod on guitar, and Doug and I as the rhythm section on bass and drums. We went through Rod and Tanya’s library of songs (which is far larger than ours!) starting with numbers 0-9, then on down the alphabet from A-Z, playing songs that we all knew. Even playing each song only once, and skipping any that were unknown or uninteresting, after an hour we were only partway through the A’s so we decided we’d better switch to picking at most a couple of songs for each letter of the alphabet. Before we finished, we’d played 48 songs!
About an hour before we had to break down for our load-out and head on down the road, Tanya suggested we pick our favorite songs from the weekend of jamming and record them. Brilliant! We picked 5, set up a phone cam and recorded them – each song in one take. We’ve got videos to show of a few of them, including Cat Stevens’ Wild World, which features Rod on vocals, and Elvis’ Don’t Be Cruel, which we all just seemed to enjoy playing. Wait, we still have 10 minutes left! Well, it’s Sunday morning, so Tanya suggested we try Lionel Richie’s Easy (Like Sunday Morning). It was one of our better recordings and ends with a lovely send off by Tanya!
It was a wonderful meet up! We’re hoping to get another chance in the next few years.
For anyone who’s interested, more farm and jam pix…
