Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Above and Beyond.
Nothing is more exciting than gig day. You wake up excited and spend the whole day anticipating the moment when you can step on stage and let your music be heard by an overexcited crowd. Music is our life. On a normal day everything goes great. The van gets loaded, the road is clear, and the odds our in our favor.
Sadly this was not the case on Saturday, March 19th. The day started out like any other, filled with talk of the night to come and wonderful fantasies about massive venues and world tours. The fantasies were soon cut short as we made our way onto the Muskogee Turnpike heading to Tulsa for our show at The Vanguard that evening. In one short moment everything can go from perfect to chaos as we soon found out when the rear tire suddenly blew out! With quick reactions and timely maneuvering we safely made our way from 70mph down to zero and off to the shoulder of the road. As we sit in shock at how quickly a perfect day can turn so bad we all had the same thought on our minds, "Time to fix a tire". With hazard lights on and a careful plan of exit to avoid the 5 o'clock traffic whizzing by we made our way to the back of the van.
Now, in a normal perfect world we would've had all the tools to make the job quick and easy. However, in the world of touring musicians we all know this is not the case. We soon realized that our jack was without a handle and had no way of not only letting our spare down but getting the blown tire off. So what do we do? How are we going to make it to our show? Is this really how our day is going to end?
No.
As we laid under the van trying to rack our brains on how we are going to get this devious task accomplished we noticed flashing blue and red lights behind us. Hello Oklahoma Highway Patrol. In this day and age people tend to discredit how wonderful it is to see those flashing lights in a time of need. Enter Officer Danny Upton to the rescue! We can not begin to thank him enough for his amazing help! Not only did he have a jack for us to use but he also volunteered to drive us to the nearest gas station to pick up some FixAFlat to air up our spare. With the spare tire on and FixAFlat working its magic Officer Upton then proceeded to escort us to the gas station just to make sure we made it ok. Without Officer Upton our day would've came to an end before it even began.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol for going above and beyond in helping us out Saturday. Officer Upton was a tremendous help in assisting us. we are very grateful for his kindness, without his help we would have never made it safely to the show. Stranded on the side of the turnpike is not a fun situation but with his help we were on our way in no time.
From everyone at the RedWitch Johnny family we would Love to say thanks for being marvelous Officer Danny Upton of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.