12/03/09 Osnabruck

One day melded into another as I found myself driving all through the night until we hit Osnabruck. Making it through 5 countries in a day ain’t bad by my count (UK, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany).

For breakfast I decide to have a drink in celebration of my completed driving marathon. I don’t know why, but apple juice and rum reminds me of Bundaburg Rum from Australia. Perhaps it’s the sticky, sweet taste. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been awake for 27 hours and I’m having lucid memory dreams.

The hotel we're staying at let's us check in early and they have swanky toilet paper.

We have all afternoon to catch a nap and go guitar shopping.

Then we drive around a bit looking for the club, which turns out to not be where the GPS tells us it is, and I chase down some guys who I decide in my mind are the people dropping off our backline for the tour. I speed them down all Grand Theft Auto style, but they turn out to just be some random guys that now think I’m a lunatic.

Well that was short lived- we were all fired up about how much space we had in our Volkswagon T5. We could stretch out, someone could take a nap in the back, you know, the real perks of touring in a van. But then we show up at the club and meet our back line: instrument after instrument stares us down in steroid bursting cases. Ironic change of circumstance, this time the awesome backline company brought us too much gear. With kindness in their hearts, they left us an extra guitar amp and bass amp just in case we have problems with the ones we ordered. Unfortunately, thanks to the beefed up flight cases, we can’t fit the spare amps in the car. The heavens have a funny sense of humor. Last night our emaciated backline left James playing drums whilst sitting on a bucket and now this. But I rock some mad geometry with T’Nealle and vacuum-pack the back of the van full of gear. So much for being all excited to use the rear view mirror for the German leg of the tour.

The club is volleyball-tastic. You have to walk through a party bus to get to the front door, and the building is surrounded with sand, shade structures, and coconut oil dispensers. RADICAL! There is another party bus in the parking lot that sells drunk food. Charlie of course has to get a pizza-stuck.

After the show, I thought a girl was complimenting me on my beard, but it turns out she was really just totally into my belt. Later she told me that she missed my band but heard we were super awesome and wanted me to sign her dress. Well, I guess that’s what happens when you miss a band- you end up asking their tour manager to sign your dress. I’m sure she’ll still cherish it forever.

12/02/09 SWEET PARIS!

I had plans last night to wake up early and go to the Tate for an hour. And although I still woke up early, it seemed like a bad idea to fit one more thing in. We already have to get a taxi, get to the Eurostar, get on a train to Paris, go rent a van in Paris, reacquaint myself with driving on the right side of the road, and get to soundcheck on time, and then leave after BBE’s set to start our 8 hour drive to the next day’s show in Germany. So yeah, 34 minutes at the Tate seemed like a bad idea. I’m sad, but it just wasn’t meant to be this time through.

I eat my last English Breakfast (tear) and we sardine into the taxi. I can’t even see James in the back seat, can you?

The train ride to Paris goes even smoother than I could have ever hoped, other than I get a lil sick on the train. I can’t even remember the last time I got motion sickness, but I persevere and make it without perfuming the train car with my English Breakfast.

Charlie goes on the quest for the rental van with me. We almost get the nice Scandinavian rental car desk attendant to come on tour with us. And so now it’s 6:30 and the firs thing I get to do is drive in Parisian rush hour traffic. Holy shit, it’s like driving in a massive, scared school of fish. Two of my immediate thoughts are:

-Great Britian, I miss your yellow light flashing before turning green

-Paris I like your little eye-level green light, but I don’t like that you don’t have a signal light across the road.

The club is super swank , a little underground deal that just keeps going and going as you walk down the stairs. The dressing rooms and actually caverns cut into the ground. Our backline, alas, suffered a bit of mistranslation. So we have no kick drum and four guitar stands. Interesting.

Micky is our Artist Liaison, and he takes care of us like battle champs. We hit up a quaint mood-lit French/Italian Bistro and proceed to sophisticatedly inhale beef tenderloin, tuna steaks, gnocchi, and pesto penne with a couple bottle of Valepeccio wine. If they feed me like this every night, then fine, if you twist my arm, I will do this forever.

We take shots with Micky and effervesce at each other “you the best”, “no you the best”, “no you the best”, “no YOU the best” etc. Micky is totally into Rush Hour.

Holy shit I left GB and I’m in a country now that doesn’t have English as it’s first language, and the dj STILL plays Parklife, Smells like Teen Spirit, and Song 2. WTF?!?

BBE finally gets playing around 1AM and the crowd starts a CIRCLE PIT. A very nice, excited circle pit with no slam dancers doing the skankin’ pickle or whatever it’s called.

At the end of the night a girl and her friend are glowing as they ask me to sign their notebook. Well, why not., I do know how to clutch a pen and move it around on paper so that it looks like something. She tells me that she just loves the Junior Boys, and I realize she thinks I’m one of them. COOL. Enjoy your autograph! XOXO, LUV U FOREVA! THX FOR LISTENING!

12/01/09 Day Off

It wasn’t really a day off. At least not in a lazing-around-in-the-steam-room-recouping-while-beautiful-Amazonian-people-in-loincloths-attend-to-your-every-hungover-need kind of day-off (those day’s off are much better). Instead, I spent the day zooming around with T’nealle to pick up my new glasses (saw a fox in the heart of London, yay human encroachment on animal habitats!),

picking up merch in Reading (screw you and your tractor beam, Reading. We must have driven around in circles for another hour trying to escape the under-construction roundabouts that wouldn’t let up exit towards Heathrow), contimplating what was running through Iggy Pop's mind when he agreed to do car insurance ads,

and dropping off the car at the airport.

It took six hours. Definitely not an exciting day. But I totally got through my first two weeks ever driving in the UK without destroying anything on the vehicle, or another vehicle for that matter (okay, I scraped the hub cap on the front parking side a couple times. Have you ever tried parking in London? You need to have those whitewalls kissing the curb. Anyway). When we finally get back to the Walrus, my brain’s just not working quite right. So I go for a walk and check out the London that you see in all the books: Big Ben, Cleopatra’s Needle, Buckingham Palace, Gordon’s Wine bar.

It’s cute, and it’s funny to see all these landmarks while having flashback memories of learning about far-off places like London as a kid and it seeming like such a mystical place that only kings get to visit if they’re lucky. Instead, here I am, watching people piss on the monuments while I try not to get pick-pocketed. Ah, the destruction of such lovely concocted childhood fantasies.

11/30/09 The Garage London

We wake up. We get in car. We drive straight to London. This is our longest drive of the tour, and when we tell peeps from the UK that we are driving ALL THE WAY from Newcastle to London, they go blank as a sheet. They tell us there's no way, that we can't make it, that it's JUST TOO FAR. People reading, fyi, it is a six hour drive. That's it, just six. I can handle it. Now Fargo to Seattle, THAT'S a drive. But I digress.

As far as the drive goes, I see why some English settlers just coming over to the new land hundreds of years ago came to settle in the Midwest- because instead of driving from Newcastle to London, I could have just as well've been making my way from the Twin Cities to Madison. The only differences were that I was on the left side of the road and you couldn’t stop every 50 miles for cheese curds. And there was no Wisconsin Dells to alert me that I was almost at my final destination for the day. Even the bathrooms along the way had a kinda Heartland feel:

So yeah, the drive was full of rolling hills and green. I was all worried earlier this week that the UK’s historic flooding the previous week would make traveling up north hell, but instead we just saw a couple flooded fields (today was actually our first time driving in the sunlight since Stonehenge). Not everything looked like the Midwest though:

London is nowhere near as heart-palpitating to drive through when there's light out. That's right UKers, I made the treacherous drive AND finished by 3 in the afternoon. Hoe bour them apples? And at the venue and it is already a party:

Balloons from the night b'fore still fill the 600 person venue, so we make the most of it. AND we get to hang out with our friends and tour-mates from the US- HarMar Superstar. We were actually so busy hanging out that we forget to take any pictures together. Ashton would be disgusted with us.

At some point BBE does an interview with a subsidiary of the BBC and someone calls in on Charlie's phone. She of course ends up an unwitting part of the interview. Zach loves it.

While HarMar is on stage, BBE dresses up like him and his band.

Then of course we bumrush the stage and sing the chorus of Tallboy with HarMar. T'Nealle ends up high enough on Denver's shoulders that she gets vertigo and falls off into me. Charlie has a seizure of glee. It's awesome. I'm sure there's pictures on the internet somewhere.

We end the night at the Lex. It's great to hang out with friends and get tags of love.

After a couple martinis, Charlie gets all band crushy on a Libertine member at the bar. In true fashion, a sign of affection is misread and Charlie almost gets punched. So, we decide it's time to start making our way back to where we're staying, The Walrus. But not without a pitstop. I got a picture of T'Nealle using her failsafe McLovin id to get booze. She's so happy!