Dreaming of a Guest Room in Astoria

I know nice people with guest rooms all over the world.  Why not Astoria?

One of the best things about being a traveling musician is meeting cool people everywhere I go. Another of the best things is that even though playing music in small venues may not be the ideal way to support a family, I almost never have to spend money on hotels, because I have friends with guest rooms everywhere. These friends are often on the older side, had kids that grew up and left home some time ago, which means they're generally the biggest subset of society that I know who has guest rooms.

I meet these folks in all kinds of different ways. Sometimes they're folks I met a long time ago, when I first did a gig in their town. Other times it might be someone I met because they heard a song of mine on Spotify, noticed that I had a gig coming up in their area, and thought they'd just drop me a line to make sure I was all set with a nice place to stay while I was there. 

Sometimes I forget who I know, which is sad, for a bunch of reasons. My old friend Anne Feeney kept track of who she knew with guest rooms, and even kept notes about how comfortable their guest beds were, and whether or not they had wifi. If either of us were ever playing in a town where we didn't know someone with a guest room, we'd sometimes consult each other, and meet nice new people in the process.

After doing this traveling and performing thing for nigh on thirty years now, I always know I can find a nice free place to stay, usually by writing one email or message to someone I already know. This tends to work especially well and quickly in any major city.

Less populated areas are trickier, of course. There are fewer people, and thus fewer fans of this particular obscure leftwing musician, and among those fans, fewer of them who might have a guest room, or hear that I'm coming to town and could use one.

One of those less populated areas happens to be the one place where I have been wishing for the past 16 years of living in Portland that I had a fan or friend with a guest room, and that is Astoria, Oregon.

The social media algorithms seem to do a very bad job of letting people know this, but I live in Portland, and every time the weather gets like this, that is, over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I once again fantasize about visiting my favorite town on the Oregon coast. I don't have a budget for Airbnb or hotel rooms, but I'm still vainly hoping that I'll eventually discover that one of those 16,000 monthly listeners on Spotify lives in Astoria and has a guest room that they'd be happy for me and my family to stay in now and then.