Usually I write about buzz-worthy disco music and the blogosphere, so this week I want to cover different ground: travel writing. This column explores the life of young, inexperienced road musicians. Last night, I played a show with my band at a coffee show in Port Townsend.

I’m hesitant to say that the venue was just a coffee shop, because the scene was totally bustling. The Boiler Room is a café, art space and concert venue in one prime location. The walls are covered with peace signs and slogans that that communicate sentiments like “alcohol free” and “respect one another.” This is the prototypical small-town all-ages venue and a young musician’s home away from home.

As I sat on a couch listening to music, an alarmingly friendly amateur videographer asked me if my band wanted to make a music video with him. Outside, several wispy teenagers smoked and watched the waterfront town descend into Friday evening.

My tour mates were my friends Joe Waine and Spencer Sult. I’m part of Joe’s music project called the Feathers. Spencer has his own music project called Generifus. Though we all frequented the Old Redmond Fire House in high school, we all met officially in November of 2006 at The Paradox in Ballard.

Spencer and Joe booked the show a few weeks ago. Last weekend, Joe asked me to play keyboards for his band. We had never practiced together, but I’ve listened to his songs on his MySpace page, so I believed that everything would work out fine with the show.

We missed the 3:45 ferry from downtown to Bainbridge Island. This meant that we showed up to the Boiler Room twenty minutes after the show was supposed to start. Luckily, the women at the drink counter informed us that our lateness was “how we do things around here.”

On the way to show, we listened to the new Teenagers album, Reality Check, and talked about the long, arduous week of work and school.

Eventually, Spencer fell asleep in the backseat. Joe and I compared sexual exploits and tried to cope with a broken windshield wiper in the misty Peninsula rain. Every few minutes I had to open my window and manually move the windshield wipers back and forth with my hand. It would have been funny, but the road cutting through second-growth Douglas firs was so dark that I really did worry about crashing.

We opened for a band from Olympia called LAKE. They are a hugely talented group of musicians with connections to the Anacortes music scene and the annual What The Heck festival held in that town. I had never seen them perform and afterwards I was so impressed that I bought their album.

Our set was good considering my preparedness. I had learned a few of the songs well enough that morning to play them without embarrassing myself. Joe elected to play a few songs along during the set. Spencer’s set was powerfully spiritual, as usual.

After LAKE finished, we hung around the Boiler Room and tried to scope out the Friday night party scene. I learned that there had been a basketball game at the high school, but none of the kids hanging out seemed to be a part of the hometown athlete crowd. Too bad, I would have liked to drink with some cheerleaders.

Everyone at the show but the eminently respectable members of LAKE were underage so after saying goodbye to the Boiler Room we drove to the hotel that Joe’s mom had planned for us. We three rock stars spent the rest of the evening in our underwear, drinking soda from the machine outside our room and watching episodes of South Park.

With food, gas, LAKE CD and ferry, the tour cost me a total of twenty dollars (not including the hotel room). The show had no cover, so there was no money coming to the bands. The payoff comes in the experience.