Friday December 4th - Bluegrass Jamboree Tour Starts!

Day one of the tour and we got picked up by the enormous tour bus at 6.30am (not a musicians favourite hour for rising!) We drove to Frankfurt to pick up The Steep Canyon Rangers and Beverly and Carl, who all made it safely but seem more than a little jet-lagged! At our first stop at the German services we discovered you have to pay 50 cent to use the facilities, this scarily means that if we use the toilets at the services every day we could rack up nearly £40 in Toy hearts toilet stops alone, never mind the other 7 musicians, sound man and driver! (We have since discovered a loo on the bus - this makes much more sense economically!)

Sophia, Hannah and Nicky completed a USA crossword (mainly under Nicky's guidance, although we all did contribute!) They are slightly different to the UK version, but fun none the less. daddy Cool will not partake as he considers them 'quiz words' a poor man's version of the intellectually superior cryptic crossword. Steve read his bass magazine, but did express an interest in helping us complete the tour colouring book! However, via the crossword we all learned that you 'finger print' a baby using the sole of its foot, who'd a thunk it? We also begun to Nicky's introduction to 'cockney rhyming slang' which confused him at first, but he is now getting the hang of it!

After catching up with some sleep in the nice hotel (a single room each - get in!) we have a welcome dinner tonight, and we intend to continue sampling the German beer for scientific research and of course German cuisine... kartoffel salad and bratwurst any one?