We have often been asked in interviews: What does a day in your life looks like? Well, today I feel like talking about a hell of a long but exciting one.
After more than a month on the road, traveling across Canada with Marianas Trench and Carly Rae Jepsen, we ended the ‘09 fall Canadian tour with two sold out shows in Vancouver BC on November 8th and 9th. After being on tour for so long with the same band members, we became good friends and there’s no reason good enough to make us miss a goodbye party after our last show, pushing the bed time quite late.
The alarm woke us up at 11 AM local time on a lovely rainy morning in Vancouver. As usual, we showered, got ready, packed our suitcases and grabbed a bite. But today is a special one… we’re flying out of the country for the first time in the band’s history. Direction: United Kingdom! Are we excited? Of course!!! Scared a bit and for sure, not aware of what’s ahead of us. So yeah, we gotta transfer all the merch we can fit into our suitcases, pack the truck and get to the airport. We first dropped by the UPS counter to get the tour booklets that our management prepared and shipped to us. These little books are going to be our bible. They contain all the required information for the tour: Tour schedule, venue names, addresses, contacts, hotels, time zones… all wrapped with a nice montage of us in front of the Union Jack. How cool?! J
The first surprise of the day happened at the airport. We have 22 suitcases and road cases (10 over our allowed quantity) and we are overweight (by a lot)! There’s even a case that is heavier than the legal limit... So we opened everything, switching stuff from one case to the other, trying to keep most of them under 23Kg, the magic number to avoid extra fees. Final result: It cost us an extra 2,225$ to get everything on the plane. But whatever… we pass security, board the plane and take off on schedule at 6:15PM, happy and excited.
We now have a 9 hour flight ahead of us. I was working on the reports for the finished Canadian tour for a little more than four hours. Julien is watching video footage we shot over the last few days, choosing interesting content to create our next video blog, while Frank takes every opportunity he has to talk about plane crashes. We all have a nice personal TV in front of us to kill time, with a good selection of movies, TV shows, games and music (including our album “Lost in City Lights” and a video interview we did for andPop! Pretty sweet, isn’t it?). We’re all too excited to sleep and the most we can get is an hour or two before we are served breakfast and land in London around noon, local time. We pass the border, pick up our stuff, and get out of the terminal where we meet the van rental guy who was waiting for us there. He asks us to sign the papers, gives us the keys, and literally bails.
We are now somewhere on the London Heathrow grounds with a standard truck, steering wheel on the right side/shifter on the left and an empty fuel tank. Our cellphones don’t work. We have no GPS, no map and no indication of where to go! We have to drive the truck on the left side of the road (gets quite confusing when you wanna turn right…), get to Bristol, and we have no idea where the hell it is. So ok, first thing first: We gotta find gas. So let’s roll! Here’s a side note that is good to know about the London Heathrow Airport: It is the world's busiest airport in terms of international passenger traffic. It is the world’s second busiest airport in total passenger traffic and the United Kingdom's largest and busiest airport. So we drive in circles for about an hour before we finally figure out how to leave the airport area. Once we’re out of there, we drive in a random direction, randomly find a random highway, follow it and find a random gas station, somewhere.
The second surprise arrives when we’re about to pay for gas. They only accept credit cards with an electronic chip, something we obviously didn’t have. They don’t take debit and of course we don’t have Sterling Pounds yet. But thank god, there’s a cash machine at the grocery store on the other side of the street. Get some money, some groceries, some gas, and more importantly, Chris figured out how to get the wireless internet working in the truck (Pretty rad truck feature… No idea how this is going to cost us yet but we don’t have much choice!) GoogleMaps to the rescue, we found out where we are, where we’re going and how to get there. We also found out that the highways are noted M in the UK. Not really sure why but it really helps to know.
The third surprise happened when we got to Bristol. We got off the highway, and headed downtown only to realize that most of the time, the street names aren’t written anywhere. Another thing that’s not helping is that the streets are like a plate of spaghetti… it’s a total mess to drive! So even with a map trust me, with no street names, you get lost badly and pretty fast. Signaling is also totally different than what we are used to. One that we dangerously figured out pretty fast is the one way sign; a white arrow on a round blue panel. We haven’t figured out the speed limits yet. I actually cannot believe that it’s even legal for us to drive out here. We will get better fast thoughJ. After an hour of driving around, almost hitting a cyclist and a few trucks parked the other way around, we finally got to the venue. Our buddies from The Mission District are there, stunned and happy to see that we made it. We are late of course so we unpack everything and rush into a quick soundcheck.
We get ready and jump on stage, no idea what to expect. Good surprise though!! People are really into it!! They don’t know us, they never heard of us, but they jump and they dance from the beginning to the end. This gave us the energy we needed to give a good performance for our first show ever in another territory, marking the beginning of the second step in our plan to conquer the world. We met people after the show, just like we love to do, and we finally packed the gear back into the truck, ready to leave at around midnight. This 8 hour jetlag and 30 hour day is finally coming to an end. The address for the hotel is in the booklet, we’re getting better with spaghetti city and in 10 minutes we’ll be real close to a much appreciated comfy bed.
-Phil
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