The Road to Madrid

(may 11, 2010)

Last night after the excellent gig in Luxembourg we started our big drive to Madrid. Since the third driver needed a bed and the first driver asked me if he could sleep in my bed I've been sleeping in another bunk. A normal one where I can absolutely not stretch my legs. Man that's such a drag. So I didn't sleep really well...

now we just started driving again after a dinner break at the Autogrill in Spain. I think we just passed the Spanish border so we should be somewhere near San Sebastian. When we entered the Autogrill we looked around at the dinner options but we were all really disappointed with the (lack of) options. Most stuff was already lying there for ages so we didn't dare to try all of it. To make things worse their frying pan broke down so we couldn't even order the safe fries (patatas). I ended up with a sort of barbecue sandwich and joined Pete and Daniel at a nice seat near the window where we could see the starting Spanish hillside and I think we could see a little part of the ocean. Really nice. Daniel bought a steak for 13,50... euro! That's like 50 dollar (I keep bullying Todd with his currency / US dollars, especially since he still calls all prices in “dollar” or “bucks”). Still it tasted not very well considering the amount of steak Daniel still had left when we went on our way.

By now I have already watched three movies last night and this morning: Burn After Reading, Dark Matter (if that is what it's called) and Bad Boys 2. I must say I enjoyed the last one the best, it's just what you can expect from it. Burn After Reading is really weird and not very funny, exciting or anything else. Then it suddenly is over and you realized you've just wasted 2 hours of your life, haha... ah well... I was wasted yesterday anyway.

Collin, Neal, Rich and Todd have gone by plane to Spain so the bus is a little emptier, which is nice. We are missing Collin so it's a big disorganized bunch... haha, well, not really, Max is taking Collin's place so he tells us when we should get back in the bus and stuff like that. Being a tour manager is probably not easy (as you can read on: http://blog.collinleijenaar.com).

Now I think I'm gonna try and get some sleep so I can wake up in Madrid and enjoy this only night in a hotel! I heard Collin say it's gonna be a five star hotel so that's pretty sweet. I hope I can get free internet and upload this blog.

--- a little while later ---
(image a deep sounding male voice narrating the next text)














While our friends from Transatlantic continued their travel they forgot something important. Someone actually. At the last stop you could buy all kinds of stuff at the store that was with the Autogrill. That's not a problem ofcourse, after legally buying the stuff he wanted one of our friends heard the alarm at the exit still going off. The people from the store fixed it and our friend could continue. Only to find out that he was later than the agreed time of 18.30 so the bus had just left! Max, the interim tour manager, did a head count and such but somehow one person was forgotten. To make things more painful: our friends only realized this after continuing their drive to Madrid for another hour and a half. Commotion all over, as one could expect. After calling his wife, who called the wife of Roine who called Collin, Collin called Max who told the group: “we left Daniel at the last stop!”

(end of narrating voice)

So yeah that was kind of something. We all exchanged our wisdom of how things should have gone: we should have done a real head count, if Collin was with us this wouldn't have happened, if the alarm didn't went off about Daniel's newly bought stuff, if he would have brought his cell phone, etc. Truth is these things happen. “All you can do is deal with it.” (Dream Theater - Repentance, at the end, you remember?) So the smartest thing to do was that Daniel would catch a cab and drive to our position, because if the tour bus would have to turn around, drive back to Daniel and then turn around again and drive to Madrid we would lose too much time. Also bus drivers these days are very strictly bound to a certain amount of hours they can drive. It's all being monitored so we might get stuck right before Madrid because our drivers didn't have any hours left and needed rest. Pete, Max and me decided it would be wise to watch another movie so we watched The Shawshank Redemption, 300, Shoot 'em Up and Daniel came to join us for the start of The Boondock Saints. Which we couldn't finish because we stopped at the MacDonalds in the middle of the night. It still was open, haha! So we went with like 8 guys to the MacDrive and ordered all kinds of stuff. The guy that helped us had pants with “I'm loving it” on it which Mike thought was very funny. Daniel liked his shirt better, though, on which it said: “Hamburger University”. After some English and Spanish we found out he wouldn't sell his shirt, unfortunately. So we drove the last hour to our hotel and thats where I am right now. In my room of the Westin Palace hotel in Madrid. It's a five star hotel and it looks really really nice.

Ok, I'm off to downtown with Sebastian (Roine's son)!

A Dios,

Ruben