Zurich
Ah.. Switzerland… home of triangular chocolate, cuckoo clocks, really expensive watches.. and of course.. thousands of tons of Nazi gold.
Switzerland is a bit of a strange place, they have all sorts of rules and regulations that are totally at odds with the rest of their European neighbours. The biggest problem for bands touring and playing in Switzerland is that ‘technically’ we cant take any of our merchandise into the country. We have to ship everything we have from the gig before, onto the gig after, and have fresh stuff shipped into the gig in Switzerland. All to do with the taxes we pay on commercial items. It’s a real pain..
Anyway, with that moan out of the way, we get onto the gig.. Abart is a nice little club, very well run, just not a very big stage, so it takes a bit of head scratching to figure out how we’re gonna fit everything onto the stage, but of course we manage.
The Swiss are a hard crowd to win over, so it’s a bit of a slow start for us, but as usual, a few songs in and they start to get it.
We’ve got a day off tomorrow, so there’s no real hurry to get anywhere. After the show, we all have a few drinks in the club, the girls behind the bar making some very strange cocktails… no one really gets drunk, but everyone is chilled and having a good time. Eventually we all pile out of the bar into our litlte van and get some sleep before the drive tomorrow.
Drive To Munich
So, it’s not really a day off.. I prefer to call them ‘non show’ days instead of days off. We have to drive to Munich as Mike has a signing in one of the big skate stores, but we’ve got plenty of time, we don’t need to be there until 4.30 and it’s only a 4 hr drive.
Well.. that was the plan…
Not long after we cross the border from Switzerland into Germany, we start to pull off the highway into a small rest area,. I thought Brad maybe just needed to stop for a piss… oh, how wrong I was..
Turns out the German Police have taken an interest in our little van, and have been following us since the border. They decide to pull us over to check us out. The first sign that things weren't going to go well was as we all got out of the van, one of the cops moved his hand up onto his gun… They don’t like the look of 6 scruffy tattooed people. The nervous cop takes an instant dislike to Brad, and pulls him off to one side as I’m trying to explain who we are and why we’re in their country. Next thing I see is Brad pissing in a cup in a bush at the side of the road. There’s an instant test to see if he’s under the influence of anything, but it comes up negative.. obviously, he’s a professional driver. Not happy with that, they decide to put him in the back of their car and take him off for blood test, convinced we’re all up to no good.
We’re put back in our van, with another policeman to keep an eye on us, so they can take us to the police station and have a sniffer dog come and search the van and trailer. Nervous cop tells in no uncertain terms that if there’s any misbehaving, we’ll be sprayed with CS.. strange since we’ve all been very polite and well behaved since they pulled us over.
So, we get to the station, and they put us in a holding cell for about an hour until they can get the sniffer dog over from another station. We still don’t know where they’ve taken Brad at this point.
The dog finally arrives and we’re taken back out to the van for the search. The dog goes through the van and trailer and finds nothing.. there’s nothing to find.
So after waiting for another couple of hours, Brad finally comes back, all clear after various tests have been done on him, and we’re free to go… that’s it, nothing more said than that.. “OK, you can go now”
By this time we’re never gonna make it to Munich for the signing, so I call the store and reschedule for tomorrow instead…
It’s been an interesting day…
