Loreley 2007

At last, the day came!

I slept a couple of hours on Saturday night before getting ready to be picked up by a cab that would take me to Stansted. When I arrived at the airport my flight wasn't showing on the check-in board... took me a few minutes to realise I'd got the wrong time and the flight was an hour later than I thought. Despite being so early I still almost missed it due to huge queues at security, and of course whose bag did they have to randomly pick for extra checks? As soon as they gave me my belongings back I legged it through the duty free area, ignoring somebody's attempt to tackle me for the shoe check as soon as I sprinted. Because of the delay at security, the flight took off later than scheduled and was almost an hour late at Frankfurt (obviously my friends' flight was about 30 minutes early, so they were stuck there waiting for me for almost 2 hours).







The guys had booked two small-ish cars to keep costs as low as possible, but one of the two wasn't available so we were upgraded to an Alfa 159... phwoarrrrrr! That baby did 0-150 in about a nanosecond, despite running on diesel fuel, and we kept losing the other guys on the petrol Smart who couldn't keep up with us :)))
The only problem was that we couldn't work out how to shut the radio up without losing the satnav too, and of course the instruction books were in German! We did crack it in the end though.







After meeting the last member of the group who'd already been there since the day before, and having some lunch (and several beers) on the Rhine, we then drove up to the rock and proceeded to put the banner at work. This is the official banner that will unfurl at future events too, replacing the countless sheets that were used over the years and that needed to be remade after almost every gig.




We were moved by the big man opening his heart to us and unburdening the hurts of the few past months on us. He obviously needed to unload and we were speechless that he was so candid and honest... we felt honoured - hopefully it did him good too :)

After the obligatory signing and photo session (and more beers!) we moved to the stage area and enjoyed a fantastic show by Jethro Tull.










The real fun came an hour later or so though, when Fish came on stage. The crowd had grown although he wasn't the headliner, and it was an incredibly fun gig. At the end he even had to come back out while the stage was being dismantled as a few hundred people were still there chanting they wanted him back.

Tired and achy but deeply contented, we made our way back to the cars for the long-ish drive along the Rhine, back to the airport, where we snoozed for an hour or so before it was time to check in again.

Roll on next year!