Tue., April 21, Chicago, IL (European prep)-- Today Dede flew in from Portland to join the band as Joanna's nanny for the baby. It's not everyday I have my wife along on the road with the band. I have mixed feelings of anticipation and trepidation, knowing the wide range of uncomfortable situations a band ends up in on the road. But, I do know Dede thrives in travel mode, so we'll have fun, I'm sure. My task for the day was to find a decent motel with two single rooms available for the night, and not spend over $120. As I checked through the phonebook, I began to realize this may not be that easy. Everything was overpriced, and the cheap ones were too cheap. Darnell said, "Hey, I have a friend that works at a hotel over on Lincoln. We'll hook you up with him." This could be good. I mozied over for coffee at the local bagel house, and picked up a pre-read newspaper. While shuffling through it, I ended up gazing at the "Metro" section of the Sun-Times, and there on the cover the headline read, "The razing of the bedrooms on Lincoln", with a picture of The Spa Motel, an infamous band hotel. Everyone from Greg Allman to Koko Taylor have stayed there. The article went on in lurid details about how Mayor Dealy is going to tear down three of the hotels along Lincoln Avenue to upgrade the area from the drugs and prostitution rampant there. Oh, great. I removed that page from the paper and took it back to show Darnell, intrigued about his reaction. He looked at it and broke out in a hilarious laugh. "This is bullshit! Joanna and I stayed at The Spa a few times ourselves! It's not THAT bad!" Later, Darnell and I headed out to check on a couple of the hotels I had found in the phonebook. Two were booked up, one, a Day's Inn, was just out of budget range. So, I resigned to let Darnell show me Lincoln Avenue. We headed over to an average-looking neighborhood with blatant 50's stylings, but certainly not rundown. There were no obvious signs of drug dealing or prostitution. We checked the first two motels that looked half-way decent, but there was that smell of bleach and chlorine, the Pakistani guy behind six inches of glass, and a day rate for rooms. Well, okay, so there is some prostitution going on around here. We ended up checking out The Spa, now made famous by the Sun-Times article. Fairly cool-looking place, there were dozens of pictures on the wall of all the bands that had stayed there since the early 70s, including a big picture of Greg Allman with his arm around the hotel owner. There was no glass protecting the check-in clerk and only the faint odor of cigars wafting into the lobby from the in-house bar down the hall. An attractive Slavic-looking girl was behind the counter. I suspiciously asked to look at the rooms, and the girl obliged as thought she'd been asked that a million times. The rooms were just above unacceptable. Warm, quiet, and the beds were pretty soft. They could have been cleaner, but I decided it would not gross Dede out to stay there. I booked two singles with king-sized beds. Dede and I cannot sleep together due to a combination of her fibromyalgia-related sleeping disorder and my obnoxious snoring condition. The tab was only $80, including tax, so I gladly plunked down the cash, amused that I was booking rooms in a soon-to-be-razed building because of all the drug and prostitution activity as depicted in the daily paper. The plane arrived at 1 a.m. at Midway, Chicago's "other" airport, and Dede and I finally met up. It'd been almost a month since I'd last seen her, and it was great to see her again. We hustled over to The Spa, with me hoping against hope the rooms would be okay with her. She walked in to #212, glanced around and said, "This is great!"