June 13 Bochum to Munich

One thing that frustrates me in Europe is that there’s no mobile phone plan equivalent of the Euro. I can use the Euro in at least 16 countries, but I have to get a different phone plan/sim card in every country I visit if I want to avoid crazy roaming fees. I know, waa waa, poor me. But it’s annoying. I already can’t use my American cell phone over here, so it’d be a nice treat if I didn’t have to travel around with a pocket full of sim cards. I’m starting to feel like Stringer Bell.

Part of me is willing to pay the roaming fees just so I can have the same phone number everywhere I go. But my UK sim card keeps reading “SIM CARD ERROR” every time I insert it. So after some false starts, I end up with a Vodafone sim card. The false starts involved me going to established cellphone service stores (Tmobile, O2, etc) and them telling me my only option was to sign a contract for a year. At least cell phone carriers are keeping the lying-to-your-face style of service consistent across the globe. So I find myself in an electronics store run by some kind Arabs, and my phone is up and running in about 8 minutes. I realize as I watch the dude at the fake mobile store maneuver my phone in his hands that the reason I couldn’t get the UK sim card to work is because I putting it in upside down. Stupid estanger.

And we’re off on our way to Munich. It’s a pretty monster 6 hour drive, but my Midwestern blood enjoys it a little bit. We planned ahead and got an early start so we could get the rental car back in time. But even with time to spare, it turns out that everything in Munich is actually closed on Sundays, including where I want to return the car, so I end up showing up at the airport rental return (the third return location we visit) late. I blame it on flying into an airport an hour farther away than the airport I thought I was flying into, and the desk agent takes pity on me. She agrees it’s dumb that Ryanair says they’re flying to a town they’re not actually in and waives my extra day fee. I would have been on time if I had that extra hour, really. I swear.

And so we start our little respite in Munich. We stock up on some German bum poison at the local grocery store.

We can’t quite bring ourselves to buy pre-dyed eggs to eat for breakfast though.

June 12 SOMEWHERE I DON'T KNOW THE LANGUAGE

So, I wake up in London Stansted. I’m interested to see how the next step goes, seeing as I don’t have a return ticket to the US yet, and the last time I went through UK Customs, they held me for an hour until I could prove I was leaving the country. But this time, nothing. I s’pose it helped a bit that I’m immediately traveling on to Germany, but they also didn’t rifle through my bag at all.

On the other side of Customs, I was greeted with this dumb ass cake at 8:30 in the morning. I guess I’ve heard that people eat cake for breakfast, and hey, why not, it’s not much different than a doughnut. But I’ve been eating airline food for 12 hours and I have no need for dry cookies and cake. I grab some bottles of juice, which of course are confiscated five minutes later for being over 3oz/100mL at the next checkpoint. Annoyed for 1) forgetting about the stupid liquid rule and 2) for needlessly wasting, I tromp around a bit.

I start to get a strange feeling that something’s not quite right. After poking around on the internet for a minute, I realize that the airport I think I’m flying into in Germany and the airport I’m actually flying into in Germany are two different places. Two different places by about an hour. Waa waa. Where I’m actually flying into is nowhere near Dusseldorf, which is where the airline advertised I was flying into. That’s like advertising a flight into Minneapolis and actually landing in Saint Cloud. That’s what I get for flying the budget airline. I don’t really care, other than my car hire pickup is at the airport that I’m not actually flying into. So I land in the town of Weeze (please tell me that residents of this city are knows as Weezers. Please). And so the improvising begins. Luckily, I didn’t get my car from a budget rental agency, so the world behemoth Hertz is able to accommodate my miscalculation with their last unreserved vehicle. Oh Ford Mondeo, you’re a pretty rad station wagon.

I make my 90 Kilometer journey to the airport I thought I was flying into. The band won’t show for an hour, so I go exploring. I don’t quite understand why, but there’s a desolate section at Dusseldorf International called Airport City. It has a dreary post-apocalyptic chill to the place, all the way down to the windows that are smashed out for no apparent reason and green mold growing up slick wet walls. In the hour I wait, I don’t see one person walk out of any of the poured concrete office buildings.

The sad environment is interrupted by HUGS. I find BBE, and they have a hilarious time watching me relearn how to get a car up to 200 kilometers and hour. We get to where we need to be and I’m pretty excited for some German band hospitality at this point. Meals in Germany tend to rule, but tonight we just get money to go fend for ourselves. Which means we end up eating pizza. Pizza dude has a whistle that he toots relentlessly when he needs his peon to pack up pizzas in boxes.

The show is fun and we’re off for the night to a weird apartment. Ah, the free accommodation grab bag, you never now what you’re going to get. The owner of the flat isn’t even there, but he calls up and talks my ear off about what lights not to use (kitchen ceiling, because it doesn’t create a good mood), and that we should sign the ceiling and/or his band book. I don’t know what this dude does to pass the time, but I do know that he has computer printouts of the Scrubs sitcom characters taped up on the wall of his kitchen. I’m rendered speechless and pass out on a mattress.

June 11 FLIGHT TO SOMEWHERE

I’m off on another European tour with my friends Bang Bang Eche. Last time I left the US to meet up with them in Europe, I managed a type of lifestyle clean slate by selling my car. You know, the old optimistic “sell all your worldly possessions and you’ll be released from their hold” kind of thing. Nothing of Siddhartha proportions, but you know, baby steps. This time round, it seems my version of a lifestyle clean slate is accidentally wiping my computer hard drive while reinstalling my OS. It’s actually kind of nice, seeing as I’d amassed so much crap on my computer over the years. I have all my music and writing saved elsewhere, so I feel pretty fresh, ready to re-teach my computer to make my life easier.

A giant, overwhelming heart pang sneaks up on me though, an initial small rumbling in my stomach that becomes a full blown internal quake as I realize it’s implications- I erased all my pictures from the last four years. At first, I figure other people have pictures of me from the last four years, so whatever. But then I start recalling all the little things I’d shot, some things that have already started slipping from my memory. I’m really torn about losing all the stealth, forbidden pictures I snapped in museums across the world of pieces of art I didn’t want to forget. All that brilliant street art in Buenos Aires, the foggy Chilean antiquities, the dramatic galleries painted up blood red and littered with gold frames filled with shipwrecks and disinterested ladies. I’m going to miss all those pieces of art that, for inexplicable reasons, appealed to my soul in some unspoken way.

So, the pictures will begin anew. But before getting to that, I have to get out of the U.S. My schedule to do so includes running around getting last second supplies and staying up all night doing preparation things that I don’t even remember now. I get distracted in Walgreens and wonder what the clearance of Magnum condoms says about the men in the Crocus Hill neighborhood.

I make it to my sister’s high school graduation at 2 PM (yay Beryl!), from which I jump into a cab to the airport. I have a pretty hilarious ride with a cabbie that is pretty sure I am going on the road with a skinhead band since we’re starting the tour in Germany. I have a laugh that turns into a shiver, as the idea pops into my head that this guy might have been a convert to anti-rational thinking after watching ICP’s “Miracles” video and actually believe that Germany is filled to the brim with skinheads. The thought fades and here I am at the airport, whisking through the lines, and I’m at the gate in less than 20 minutes. Hell yeah hardly used Terminal 2.

So my flight to London is on SunCountry’s inaugural flight to London. That’s right, the rickety (at least image-wise) regional airline’s first ever flight to London. I don’t have any fear of flying, so it’s just kind of hilariously exciting to me (if something mechanically grave or weather terrible is going to happen on my plane, then so be it. What am I really going to do about it? Rally up my inner John McClane and jump out of the airplane at the very last second, using the airplane door I popped off first as a parachute and then as a sled as I slide down the snowy Himalayas to safety?) . The gate is done up in pictures of the Queen and the Beatles, there’s tea to be had, and a crown and diamonds that you can wear for a photo op. As some women try on the diamonds, there’s murmurings to their boyfriends “If you really loved me you’d…” Pathetic.

The cookies are good though.

I wander onto the plane ready to pass out. But first I’m greeted by a little gift bag filled with an Elton John BlueRay, a suduko book, a passport protector, and a blue bag. I’m so excited by the booty, it takes me an extra three minutes to fall asleep for the journey. Seriously, couldn’t they have just made my ticket 10 dollars cheaper and just not given me this stuff?

Somewhere down the line, the plane has a stop in ­­­Gander, Canada, which I suppose I get off the plane for, but my mind never quite grasps what’s going on. There’s a bit of a dreamy feeling as I walk down the tube from the plane to the tarmac. As Canada’s brisk cold bites my cheeks, I feel like zombies should be coming out of the dark at the edge of the runway, and we need to fight them off before the plane will start up again, 30 Days of Night style. As I said, I didn’t quite wake up. If it wasn’t for a nice girl, I probably would still be asleep on a bench in the Gander airport.

And back to sleep.

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!