3rd concert: London (UK)

Well……. what a day….  It is now a few days later, I’ll try to get all the details correct.
We left for the airport quite early. The crew and band split up for the flight, ‘cause of the planes and their available seats. So the band went to Weze, a place in Germany and the crew went to Eindhoven. And disaster struck…. we both missed our flight, by 10 minutes…. ‘Gate closed’. How is that for the start of a day? They did not wanted to wait for us, so at 10:00 a.m. we still where driving around in The Netherlands trying to find out what to do. The truck with all the gear and instruments had been driving all night after the Rijssen gig, and was in London already. Neal was on his flight almost in London, and the rest was unable to get to London. No other flights available. The only thing that would be a fairly good idea was to drive to Calais and get the boat. But then we would arrive around the time the concert would start. Finally Derek, the guy who organized the concert in London found a nearly empty plane, leaving from Rotterdam.
We took the flight, landed around 15:00 drove for 1,5 hours, so arrived at the venue around 16:30. That is 4,5 hours to late.  And we need 3 hours to set it all up, one hour to soundcheck, and half an hour to get ready, so that is 4,5 hours. The concert would start then on 20:30, last for 3 hours (with intermission) BUT there was a licence until 10:30. So we would miss one hour of music.
So band, crew, local people everybody worked their ass off, to get the PA up and running, all the instruments in place. What a day… And there was no right power supply, so they had to arrange something. Three minutes before the concert would start officially we had power, did a line-check and without the proper soundcheck we started 30 minutes to late.
The playing was hard, because of all that happened that day, but we managed to pull it off. I did enjoy it, and reading the messageboard on Neal’s website, I can see that a you all did to!
Thanx to God for helping us with all this!
The next day we had a free day, so we went into the city of London, to drink some nice coffee at Starbucks, had a lunch at the Burger King, bought some CD’s at Virgin and saw some of the sights. Very nice and relaxing!
And then a very short night (two hours sleep), and left for the airport (to) early, so we did get our flight!!
Off to Belgium it is!