We had a day and a half off in Glasgow after the drive from Manchester. I slept the first day and spent the second walking around, followed by a very late night at the hotel bar. A group of people took the train to a castle in Edinburgh on one of the days off, but I have to admit I didn’t see much of Scotland. And talk about accents, I didn’t understand a word anyone said, they might as well have been speaking Swahili. I hadn’t an idea what they were saying, but it was cute anyhow.
The best part about the arena in Glasgow was that the Stage was about a 5 minute walk from the production offices and the dressing rooms, and you know what that means….golf carts!! For about three hours during the day I ran a taxi service to and from the stage. Back and forth, bacjk and forth. And no one even bothered to tip me! Cheapskates. The show was good, went off without a hitch, which is both good and bad, good because nothing went wrong, but also bad because it means I have no funny stories to tell you.
There were a few penguins thrown on to the stage in Glasgow. John saves every penguin anyone has ever given him or the band. And when I say every penguin, I mean every penguin. After taking the penguins in to John so they could introduce themselves, I went to put two penguins in his road case after the show…and there’s no room. There’s not even room for clothes anymore. It’s all penguins, shoved in to every drawer, in to every spare bit of space. It’s a good thing this leg of the tour is almost over, because we might have had to start sacrificing penguins.
We left right after load out to drive to Belfast. We have sleeper buses with us again, so I thought the drive would be ok because you could just crawl in bed and sleep the whole way there. Silly me. We had to take a ferry to Belfast (obviously, since Ireland is an island). I’ve never been on a ferry, well at least the kind that you drive your car onto. It’s very weird, the bottom level of the ship is basically just a big parking lot, and the upper part is restaurants and bars and lounges. So at 5:00AM, after 2 hours of sleep, everyone on my bus woke up to get off the bus and go upstairs to the main part of the ship. I asked why we couldn’t just stay on the bus and sleep, and was bombarded with replies about how I wouldn’t want to be down here on the bus if the ferry happens to sink. Everyone on my bus was going upstairs and I really didn’t feel like being alone on the bus in the dark on the bottom level of a ship, dreaming about the ship sinking, so I got up too.
Walked around delirious in my pj’s for 2 hours and nearly cried for joy when they announced we could go back downstairs.The funniest thing about it is that no one from any other bus woke up and came upstairs, they all slept through the ferry ride except for our bus. I guess they put all the paranoid people on my bus. Fell back asleep the second my head hit the pillow only to wake up an hour later for load-in in Belfast. Grrrrr.
I saw nothing in Belfast other than the arena, which is too bad, I would have liked to see the city a little bit. The funniest thing that happened in Belfast? Well, funny to me anyway. During the show, about four songs into the set, a very bad smell started making it’s way over to the stage area. We all noticed it immediately, you could see everyone looking at each other as if to confirm that they smelled it too. Come to find out there was a sewage leak in the main dressing room hallway during the show and the building maintenance people were not best prepared to handle such a situation. Apparantly the best way to fix it was to just throw a large section of carpet over it. Then, they used a wet-vac to try and clean up the water, which only worsened the smell immensely. (I have to tell you that I have a really sick sense of humor, and bathroom jokes make me laugh so hard I could cry, so needless to say, as much as grossed everyone out, I found the whole situation downright hysterical and could hardly form a sentence for about an hour after the show. Even as type this I’m laughing so hard I’m crying.)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again….it’s a glamorous life we lead out here!
We had yet another ferry to catch that night, but it didn’t leave until 8AM, so we stayed at the gig, on the buses until 4:00AM. A lot of people sat in catering drinking Guinness until the building finally kicked us out. I woke up to go upstairs on the ferry ride again, this time it wasn’t as bad since I’d had 4 hours of sleep, and we had a 12 hour drive ahead of us so I knew I had plenty of time to sleep later. The drive was long and boring, we watched a few movies and slept on and off until we arrived in London at about 7:00PM this evening. Tomorrow is our last show before we pack it up and head home for 6 weeks. I hate goodbyes, so I’m not looking forward to it.
