Cheekier By the Dozen

People are wondering why we didn't keep up with our road diary during our 4-week tour of Europe and the UK. In truth, we would have if we had had any time or energy left over to do so. In an effort to bring home any amount of money, no matter how small, we had very few days off and we waited until the last minute to find out what our accomodations were. Sometimes this turned out to be a mistake.

I want to interrupt at this point and say that it is easy to complain about things for a cheap laugh, and while we're not above that, we did have a great time at most of the places we played and we would like to return someday, perhaps with a little better preparation. For that reason, we're saving our best stories for the live shows for the time being.
I'm lending a little more mystery to the trip than it really deserves. We spent most of our time in a car or van or a pub, breathing in cigarette smoke and hoping to find a store that would sell us a phone card. Apparently the mobile phone revolution has swept England so completely, most hotels and B&Bs don't consider it necessary to have telephones, not that they were planning to get them anyway.
We saw more sheep than you can shake a stick at, and shook a stick at more sheep than you can chase with a dune buggy on a rainy day. We did our laundry in 3 different languages. I learned that certain foods just don't combine well, such as white chocolate malted milk balls and steak flavored potato chips. Now you know it too.
Paul commented after one show that to a European audience, we might as well be an Uzbek dance troupe or a Balinese handbell choir. It's just more inscrutable world music to many people. I have to say that I've felt that way in the United States on occasion. However, there's no place like home, no place like home, no place like home. Did it work? No, we're in Ashland, Virginia, on the road again. D'oh!

We owe many thanks to many people for their invaluable assistance on the road: Jan & Suzi Van der Stappen for driving and friendship; Jan's mechanic for fixing the van; Mattieu & Annemarie Brandt for hospitality and for taking Paul to a coffeeshop for supplies; Christian Back in Hermalle for flowers, candy, dinner, and a great audience; Georges Lemaire for courageously booking gigs for the very first time; Rene Malines and Jocelyn Richez for welcoming us in Paris; Willie and Christine at the Chambre d'Hotes for making us speak French even though we don't know any; the incomparable Thelma Tilling and the incomprehensible Robert Tilling, M.B.E., for more than they could ever know; Scott and Sue Duncan for hospitality, hangover help, and an evening with sputtering genius Ken Dodd; Toni Weekes for frighteningly efficient booking; John Anderson for Henry VIII and more; Eddie and Nikki Martin for a delicious dinner, good company and a fruitful meeting with the Artful Dodger; Paul Jones and Sue Welch at BBC2; Keith Johnson and Bertie and her husband for unbelievable Welsh Broth and for being the only reason we would ever have found Martletwy and Cresswell Quay; Barbara and Gary Hood and Burnley Mechanics for taking good care of us in Burnley; Tricia Arnold at Rykodisc for going the extra mile when our CDs went an extra 200 miles; The chef at the Fountain Inn in Parkend for cooking eggs in butter ("never tried that before."); countless promoters, theatre managers, soundguys, lighting dudes, flight attendants, hotel desk clerks and airline pilots for helping us do our job and be on our way; and last but not least, now that we're back home and driving long distances again, we'd like to thank Dick Cheney for the gasoline crisis of 2006. Thanks, Dick!.