Simon and Shane enjoying some bratwurst in Nuremberg
Day 1
Today mum and dad dropped me off at Simon’s house. Simon, Lucille and I drove to Manly to go to the pub before meeting up with Shane at the international airport. We signed the carnet and got ready to board our Etihad flight to Abu Dhabi. We couldn’t check in because an older man had been assaulted in the line and someone was being arrested. We eventually checked in and the person working on the desk was great. They let us get away with a few kilograms of extra weight. We then went to the Air New Zealand lounge to wait for our flight. We boarded and sat down for a really long time.
Day 2
We landed in Abu Dhabi and raced to the first class lounge for a shower before boarding our next flight, with only a few minutes to spare.
I got asked to move, at the time having a nice window seat, got asked to move again and had an aisle seat, and asked one more time to move, where I was then sat in the middle seat with air conditioning liquid dripping on me for 8 hours.
We landed at Heathrow and picked up our van from a British gentleman called Jack. We drove in to Camden, London to pick up backline from John Henry’s and then on to Simon’s auntie Rose’s house to pick up the lighting that she had left in a garbage bin in her front yard for us. It was pretty funny.
We then drove to a very quaint little hotel in a place called Hickstead and checked in. It was 36 degrees in London that day, which was very hot for the UK.
We went a pub in Burgess Hill and had a Guinness and Cumberland sausages with mash and then drove back to the hotel and went to bed.
Day 3
Last night I had a pretty restless sleep because the room was so hot. We drove to TESCO and bought food for breakfast before going to Brighton to do pre production at Stinky Mike’s. I met Tom, who is doing front of house for the tour.
I’m glad we did pre production because Simon’s hi hat stand was broken, however we managed to fix it and ended up pretty happy with how everything was sounding.
We decided to drive via Cologne on the way to Prague, which was a good idea at the time. Tom drove really well the whole way from Brighton and by the time we got to the euro tunnel a massive storm had started. After exiting in to France we drove through an incredibly violent storm. There was more lightning than I ever remember seeing.
We made it to the Ibis budget at about 3am and Tom struggled to park the van for about 10 minutes before an old German gentleman yelled at us so we just parked on the street.
Day 4
We woke up and Shane and I drove to a supermarket near the hotel and got some food for breakfast before meeting up with the others and doing the same. We started driving to Nuremberg.
Today was really hot, 37 degrees at times and the van started overheating with quite a few warning lights coming on. Not a good start.
We stopped a few times and let it cool down and eventually made it to Nuremberg. The back 6 seats in the van get really hot so we tried to buy a fan, or ventilator as they’re called in Germany, but had no luck after trying about 10 different stores of all varieties. We checked in to our ibis budget and Shane had a really nice bratwurst restaurant he wanted to take us to. Bratwursthäusle bei St. Sebald. I had 8 sausages, potatoes and sauerkraut. It was really delicious. After dinner we walked up through a beautiful castle and then went home to bed.