We'll be flying out tomorrow afternoon (May 14th) and will be gone for two full weeks.  First stop will be Paris, France and a few days to get adjusted and see some sights, drink some wine and finally play a show at Disney Land for the Disney Fest.  We'll be headlining the Saturday night part of the show, which should be exciting. 

Then the plan is to head to Germany for a few days, visit some castles, drink some German beer, and apparently play a show of some sort.  Should be interesting....it'll be the first time we've been over there and actually driven ourselves around.....wish us luck. 

After Germany we'll have a couple of days off, and the plan is to head  Venice, Italy.  We went a few years ago and it was pretty amazing, the only problem was we only spent one afternoon there.  This time we plan on staying a couple of days before we head to Florence and Modena to play a couple of private parties.  I'm really looking forward to that, our friends Cristian and Max put the shows together and we've become good friends over the years.  Cristian and his wife actually came down to Pleasanton and stayed with us for a weekend and saw us play at the Cowboy Homecoming.  It'll be great to see them again. 

After the show in Modena we'll have to be up early for a 12 + hour drive back to Paris and catch a flight.....fortunately we'll have about 24 hours to get there.  We might need it, unless they switch the road signs to english. 

Should be another great trip, I'll post a few blogs on the website while we're in Europe, as well as some pictures hopefully. 

We'll be back on the 28th, play Gruene Hall on the 29th (a good homecoming)....head to north on the 30th for our first show in Temple, TX at a place called "The Ranch" (ladies get in free if you're in the area).  On the 31st I'll be heading back to Pleasanton to play the class song for this years graduation. I am honored that the class voted "Goodbye To My Hometown" off of the Living The Good Life album as their class song (thanks). 

No rest for the weary......Sunday June 1st and Monday June 2nd the band and I will be rehearsing and will go into the studio to cut a new album on the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th.  Then the 7th we'll be with Robert Earl Keen at Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels. 

So....a lot of exciting things going on.  Hopefully we'll see you all when we get back.  We have a ton of dates on the calendar for the summer.....so take a look at 'em, find a show or two near you, round up some friends and come see us. 

We're pretty low on merchandise (even cd's)....so we're halfway anticipating coming back from Europe with literally no merchandise left in our inventory.  We sold a lot of stuff the last few weeks, and the Europeans love to buy merch. from our previous experiences.......but we do have an order in for all new stuff.  Shirts, caps, koozies, thongs (seriously), tank tops, etc.  and that stuff should be in pretty soon after we get back. 

If you want a cd and we don't have any at the shows in the next month or so, remember you can still get them all at www.rodneyhayden.com as digital downloads for your Ipod or you can get them at iTunes. 

See you all soon. 

Rodney