It was chaos - why would it be any different. I always have trouble getting ready to go away and this time I think I've figured it out - it's like dying, you've got a finite amount of time left and after that it'll all be too late.
So at the last minute I make a list of everything I've got to do and everything I can think of that I need to take with me. And then I hope for the best.
At the last moment we found that Amy's hard acoustic guitar case was in storage in Cleveland and the case we'd assumed her guitar, the one that's sitting in the barn, is too small to fit any of our guitars. Our friend Emmanuel came to the rescue and I ended up swapping my Guild Starfire case for a lightweight fibreglass outing of the sort I probably wouldn't have been seen dead with ten or fifteen years ago. Amy's carrying the Harmony Silhouette in Emmanuel's Telecaster case on the understanding that it comes back covered in stickers from the US of A.
Things were further complicated because another friend, Angie, husband of the brother of the Cleaner From Venus mentioned in the last load of drivel, had to pick up the PA system so that the Lawrence d'Arabie cinema and open mike nights can continue in our absence. I've been running the cinema nights and Angie's taking over while we're away. Her son Ned runs the open mike night or Scene Ouverte as it's called in France. I just supply the PA which consists of a cheap and nasty Tascam mixer, a couple of Peavey cabinets and a power amp which I salvaged from a friends barn clearance.
I had to show Angie how to set the PA up and mix the sound. She knew nothing about it before we started so it was a bit of a challenge but with the aid of a digital camera and a hastilly put together help sheet. We were thinking that ought to be plasticised. Angie and I are the same age and we both remember when we were young, in the early sixties when plastic was still a fairly new invention - it replaced bakelite. People didn't know how to pronounce it - some people, particularly posh people and people from the south east of England called in plarstic. It took some time to establish an agreed pronunciation and I suppose it's one time that the North of England won out.
But that's by the way. We shared a couple of supermarket pizzas, Emmanuel, Angie, Amy and myself. It was like a little going away party. Then we had a quick two and a half hours sleep and got up in the middle of the night to drive to the station in Limoges.
It took months of careful planning to organise the journey from South West France to North West North America. I wonder if I'll ever know if it all worked out. We gave the keys to Angie to give to some other friends, Phil and Chris, who are keeping an eye on the house while we're away. They've got a spare set of car keys and by now they will hopefully have picked our car up from the station, driven it back to ours and stored it in a junk-free space in the barn which Emmanuel had helped me to create at one o'clock in the morning.
We caught the first train to Paris and that took three and a half hours. Then our dear friend Lo picked us up at the Gare d'Austerlitz and took us and our horific amount of luggage to Charles de Gaulle airport. When I say a horrific amount of luggage I'm talking about enough luggage that a train might set off before you've finished getting it all on the thing, the sort of bulk and quantity that prohibits use of the subway. Movement of a monolithic nature, primitive man, Stonehenge, the stuff of my childhood nightmares.
Actually it's not quite as bad as Stonehenge - just four guitars - Amy's Gibson acoustic, Harmony Silhouette, Guild Starfire and Fender Mustang bass - plus a laptop bag full of laptop, sound module and assorted leads, and a couple of suitcases, one of which is the size of a steamer trunk. And we hardly took any clothes, most of it is effect pedals, leads, folding guitar stands and the trusty keyboard stand that isn't one of those X shaped things that you can't get your legs under.
When we got to the airport we found that our Lufthansa flight was actually a United flight and the computers were down so there was a queue that went all the way round the terminal building and joined up with the end of itself. I was in front of two talkative business men who didn't seem to understand the concept of personal space. Every time the queue moved a fraction they moved two fractions. At one point I turned round and asked one of them if he'd like to put his cock in my arse as well. They didn't get it.
I once suggested to a man in a bank who stood too close that we open a joint account. He didn't get it either. And once on a transatlantic flight I resorted to elbowing an annoying neighbour so hard that I winded him and possibly broke a rib or two. I'd had six hours of being prodded, elbowed, breathed over and reached over. He had some family sitting over the aisle and he kept leaning over me to talk to them. I suggested we change places but he didn't want to. Shortly after he'd spilt a cold cup of coffee over me I snapped. I was discrete though - I pretended to have a spasm in my sleep that involved shoving my elbow into the side of him at an alarming velocity. His gasping sort of woke me up...
But the flight to Washington DC was pretty good because we were upgraded to Economy Deluxe or some such nonsense. That meant we were at the front of Cattle Class and we had Extra Leg Room. First time that's ever happened to me. We did quite a lot of sleeping - I didn't even watch a film which is rare for me on a long flight. I don't usually sleep, just watch the crappy films until my mind becomes utterly stupified and I achieve the sort of trance-like state that Bhuddists in Outer Mongolia spend years trying to get too. I don't know what all the fuss is about - just watch Sleepless In Seattle four times and you're there.
We had a three hour stop over in DC. Immigration was a little tricky because I filld in the green form when I should have filled in the white form. So even though I'm an alien of extraordinary ability I sneered at by officials and shouted at like the moronic arsehole that I obviously am - GET TO THE BACK OF THE LINE...
Still, we had a super Bombay Salad in an airport food outlet where the waitress said 'Hi, how are you doing today?, just like we'd known each other for years. Amy's used to it so she whipped in there with 'Pretty good, how are you?'
When we ordered the Bombay Salad the waitress said 'Good choice' like she was complimenting us on our excellent taste. When it arrived it obviously wasn't a good choice.
The flight to Portland was gruelling. We were back in the usual seats, two steps from the toilet and surrounded by parents with babies. The food arrives, the guy in front reclines his seat and, if you feel inclined to eat airline food, or you're desperate, you have to manouvre forkfuls between your face and the back of the seat in front with the tray table raising a welt in your midrift.
It was five and a fucking half hours of fucking purgatory. I'd gone beyond tired, I kept willing myself to fall back asleep because I couldn't stand being awake. And suddenly we were there. And then we were in a courtesy bus going to the Red Lion Hotel with all our horrific amounts of luggage, and we didn't know what time it was, what planet we were on, who we were or any of that. It was twenty four hours since we'd got in the car to drive to the station.