I can breathe in a small town.

Our loyal fans in Moberly, Missouri, are part of the reason The Hiccups and I love playing in small towns. Of the 14,000 people (26,000 metro) who live in Moberly, about 400 of them came out for the show last Friday night. Pretty impressive, considering that about 100 turned up at our last show in Denver (Pop: 588,349 and 2.4 million metro).

Thank you Moberly! And thanks to the good folks with Parents as Teachers whose hard work is to remind us that we are the best teachers in the world! And a shout-out to the very loud student body at North Park Elementary! Salute!

With the hospitable good will of small towns, comes the challenge of finding a vegetarian meal. There is usually a Subway sandwich or a BK veggie burger or a Taco Bell bean burrito to fall back on, but we can only ingest so much of that stuff. Vegetarians like variety, too.

So, typically while in Moberly we visit Rick's Americana Grill for some veggie pasta or grilled fish (Jeni and I both eat fish for various reasons I’ll explain some other time). Because it’s one of the few full-service restaurants in town, it usually takes a bit longer than we have for a pre-show meal. We branched out and tried the Santa Fe Mexican Restaurant this time and we were pleased. What do we eat at Mexican restaurants? Lots of beans (that is, those not prepared with lard) and Jeni goes for the chile rellenos. Great service, good prices, and hearty beans and rice. Our waiter was from Mexico City and the guy who cashed us out was from Playa del Carmen. When asked how they managed to end up in Moberly, they both answered, "The job."

Since Moberly is called "The Magic City," it sure would be nice if we could -- POOF!!-- hocus-pocus ourselves a good vegetarian meal sometime. We'll wave our wands on the next go round.