Transatlantic Whirld Tour 2010 (2)

Sunday, April 11. ‘…start your engines’

I’m typing this while flying above Ireland at an altitude of over 10 km and speeding with almost 950 km per hour towards Los Angeles to start the Transatlantic Whirld Tour 2010.
Unfortunately I just broke my in-ear headphones, so this will be a loooong flight…. sigh…. The battery of my MacBook Pro will only last for another 4 hours, so about 7 hours of time to kill afterwards.
My job will be tour manager, so it will be a very busy time. During this tour we will hit 22 cities in 10 countries with well over 20.000 people attending the shows. But first the band is going to rehearse in LA for a few days, and next Saturday we will have the first show in Downey, CA. It looks like most of the shows will be selling out (some are already sold out) so if you do not have any tickets yet – make sure you do. You do not want to miss this!
When the plane arrived in LA after a bumpy finish of the flight (at one point I thought one of the engines under the wing would surly break off looking at how it dangled under the wing during the turbulence) the waiting started at customs. Somehow everybody that needed to travel was travelling at the same time, at the same airport. Finally after being in line for 45 minutes, clearing customs I was picked up by Pam, a woman working for Calprog – the promoters of the first gig in Downey and she brought me to my hotel. To try to beat any form of a jetlag my goal was not to go to sleep, although in my Dutch timezone it was 23:30 already, here in LA it was only 14:00, so a long day ahead of me. I wanted to keep moving, so what do you do when you are in LA and have time to kill? Yes, you go to an Apple store to check out the new iPad and buy new headphones. The iPad is a very cool device, and I found out that my website is iPad proof!

When Roine, Daniel & Pete arrived a few hours later we went to Guitar Centre to buy some stuff they needed for the tour. Had dinner and after a day of being awake almost 28 hours I finally went to bed. Was too tired to dial in the right Sleep Number in my Radisson Sleep Number Bed (what is that all about….) and hoped for a good night sleep.