Germany!

A street in Bad Doberan, East Germany and a photo of Julie backstage at Zappanale, talking with Don Argott, producer of Rock School.

Ha ha - click on the Rock School trailer and you'll see a young Julie and me (with short hair ugh). The trailer actually opens up with me on the drums, then you'll see me whacking myself in the head with my sticks when I get frustrated...and there's a blurb of Julie and me sitting side by side trashing the band 311. We're also on stage at Zappanale at the end of this clip if I remember correctly.

So, finally, we're in Germany. Did I say we had 6 flights in 9 days? Make that 10 flights in 9 days. Or something like that.

We don't go on stage until tomorrow night -- the Adrian Belew Power Trio is the headliner, so hopefully I'll get to do some sightseeing. At Zappanales past I was still part of Rock School and wasn't free to roam around.

As I said, Bad Doberan is in East Germany which I'm sure you all know was formerly communist. It's a tiny, beautiful village bordered by the Baltic Sea and an old fashioned steam train is the only transportation in the town -- if you ride it to the end (about 20 minutes) you arrive at this crazy beach which has bombed out beachfront art deco buildings and colored stones instead of the seashells we're used to in New Jersey. But first you have to walk through a dense forest to get there. We're only here two days, then get a load of our schedule:

After our show Sunday night, we head back to our hotel because the very next day we leave for Italy and our flight is at 11:30 a.m. We arrive in Rome at 3:00 p.m. on Monday and our show is at 9:30 p.m. The following day, after I guess having an outrageously excellent lunch in Italy, we take a 3:40 p.m. flight from Rome to Munich to Berlin. If all goes according to plan, we'll get to Berlin at around 8:00 pm and spend the night there. Then, on Wednesday, at 8:30 a.m., we take a flight from Berlin to Amsterdam, where we have a show at 8:30 p.m. that evening. What's cool is that we get to spend most of Thursday in Amsterdam but then we have a 9:10 p.m. flight back to Berlin, where we then have to drive four hours to Herzberg, where we will be on stage as part of the Herzberg Festival at 9:00 p.m. On Saturday, we take an 11:20 a.m. flight from Frankfurt to New York to Nashville, where we should (hopefully) arrive at 7:30 p.m.

Is that crazy or what?

So I'm off to check out the festival right now, do some exploring, and I'll be back later with any news and of course a write-up of Sunday night's show.