Won’t Do It Like This Again
So here’s the gist of what this has been like so far: we arrive, wait two days, play a great show to some stellar responses, then travel a bit further up to Brussels through a really tough day getting there, only to wait three more days before we actually hit the stage again. And come today, we just found out our Saturday night show at the Chateau de Goncourt was just cancelled due to a mix-up in dates.
But backing up first- we thought we had a sweet and easy day of travel from Attignat to Brussels on Monday. We left for the airport at noon, relying upon the GPS to get us there. However, the GPS set for Geneva airport on the Swiss side, and that’s the wrong side. We came in last week and rented the car from on the French side. So we got to the airport and I started spouting “This feels wrong…” then asked a taxi driver, who gave us directions. We followed his directions, but here’s the thing: I’m driving and trying not to kill us with other traffic and interpreting lines on the road and barely any road signs, and none that say ‘La Cote de l’aeroport Francais’. Nothing to help us find our way. We drove around the same turn-around twice and finally decided we’d been confused by one turn back aways. So we went forward and down that turn and ended up UNDER the airport but still not on the right side. So I turned us around, after an hour of this, almost crying, and got out of the car and accosted some guy on a bicycle. He gave me directions again, and I had him repeat them 3-4 times until he finally pulled away and said ‘Lady I have to go…’
The thing is, we could see the road we needed to be on, but couldn’t access it through the barbed wire fence keeping us on the Swiss side. We finally followed the bicyclist’s directions and through the entire village (all of us in the car) found our way. We returned the car no problem, then got to the EasyJet desk where it got really hard.
Tried to check in at one desk and she sent me to another. That desk sent me to the first, and then we realized we actually needed to be upstairs back in Switzerland to check in, and not here in the basement, in France. We travelled down narrow hallways with our wide heavily loaded merchbag and suitcases, had to tumble down a non-working escalator, finally finding the Easyjet desk proper. We got our loading tickets and bag tags, then when we went to load them in, found I’d underpaid for the weight. You pay extra for number of bags but also extra for extra weight. She held our boarding passes until we had to go to yet another desk and actually pay, then we could come back to her and get our passes and board. Incidentally, when she gave us a tag for the snare drum and told us we would have to also check it elsewhere, when we got to the gent at that special check in desk, he asked where the special tag was. We showed him the fragile tag, but it was evidently the wrong one. We marched back over and just checked it with the regular bags to avoid further chaos.
But we still had to wait in this other line behind 4 large families all accosting the agent at once. After 25 minutes of one such family take over the single working agent, and watching the clock inch closer to our boarding- now in 40 minutes- I started wondering how would they know how much to charge me and called over to Jorge across the airport. He comes over, tells me that the stewardess had given Kevin a sheet of paper with his name on it and some numbers. I got that back from Kevin and marched back over to the large family line, finally stepped forward and over the line barriers to say that our flight was leaving quickly and could they help us? The lady waved me over and figured our costs for overweight charges $1000, dang… ouch… then we ran back over to the 1st counter to get our boarding passes, and there was no one there! I called out to a stewardess across the hall and she came climbing over everything to get to us, found our passes, and handed them to us.
We still had to get through security and all the way around and across the airport to our gate, huffing and running and sweating to arrive just as we board,,, whew. So much for the shower I took that morning, and for breaking even we were hoping to do this tour.
Then today we find about the Saturday show being cancelled- a biggish show- So now we can only hope and pray that the remaining shows will be stellar, like Attignat, and lucrative, so we can rightly pay the rhythm section gents and our new travel debts and come home not too in the hole!
Here’s to it, hope to see you all down the road soon, RD
