Brunettes Go America: Strange how it feels like home

In this final instalment of his American tour diary, Brunettes bassist James Milne discovers the Dunedin and Auckland of America

Rock journalists sometimes flippantly refer to American tours as "jaunts". Well, this little jaunt is coming to an end in the moist surroundings of Portland, Oregon. It's a slightly derelict kind of place, a confused mess of opiate addicts, wealthy hiking equipment entrepreneurs and indie musicians. Kind of like Dunedin actually, although this comes within the context of the perverse pleasure I have been getting throughout this journey from comparing parts of America to New Zealand.

Wyoming was the Mackenzie Country, North Carolina was driving over the hill into Fairlie, Minnesota had a little patch of SH1 coming from Christchurch into Ashburton.

Last time I wrote we were in Kansas, facing the inevitable, mystical threat of tornadoes that the name Kansas connotes. Twisters notwithstanding, the show featured tumultuous applause and a standing ovation in the gallery, a truly heartwarming response for the lowly support act. Not that the heart hasn't been warmed by the response on many other occasions along the way. America has been very welcoming towards the Brunettes, but Lawrence was certainly something pretty special.

We ended up in a roadhouse dancing, whooping and sweating to old R&B and soul music, trying to be funky but looking so white, arguing the difference between cilantro and coriander in conversations where everything's so loud and blurry, i that we never get to agree they're the same thing. And everyone's getting sincere and really "feeling" what the other has to say and being all "this has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life, I'm going to miss this. In fact I'm so going to miss you, you are just the best". Ad infinitum.

With men kissing and grabbing each others' bottoms, Shins and Brunettes parted ways. The Shins hopped on the Prevost tour bus to sleep all the way to Omaha, Nebraska, the location of the next show. The Brunettes jammed themselves in the Ford van travelling back to the Days Inn in Lenexa, where Jonathan and Harry wandered in circles, lost in that nondescript suburban zone between motel and Dennys in search of a 4am drunken fry-up.

The Brunettes and Shins met again the following afternoon, crashing back down to earth the next day in Omaha, both bands full of hungover regret and a realisation that it would take some divine appearance to top the night before. No apparition was seen.

Denver and Salt Lake City followed, two days of long, exhausting drives up and over the Rockies through endless grass plains with tumbleweed, and a blizzard in Wyoming as the road climbed over 2000m above sea level. The 3220km of driving in three days was a hell of a slog, even with the excitement for some of seeing snow falling for the first time.

But after countless beef jerky, Doritos, pepperoni, fuel-up and toilet stops, we finally made it to Seattle, reassuringly affluent and bearing many comforting resemblances to Auckland, which we observed from the 26th floor of our particularly well-appointed downtown hotel.

In stockinged feet, jumping on the beds, with the room service menu as our crystal ball, we could almost see the hors d'oeuvres in our future, just beyond another 16,000km of American freeway.