I know that there are positively dozens of you wondering how our trip is going… plus Kenny and Georgia have this finger condition known as “Typus bloglazius” which precludes them doing any typing so it leaves all this work on my fingers and shoulders.

To keep you caught up, Georgia and I got invited to the Belfast Songwriter Festival in Guam. Just kidding. Oddly enough, it’s in Belfast, Ireland. We also got invited to play a show for the Bluebird Cafe in London … with Striking Matches and Chip Esten (he plays Deacon, on Game of Thrones).  Since I have happily been the Bluebird’s bitch for the last twenty years, I agreed; and since Georgia has happily been MY… ow! Ow!
Georgia was sweet enough to kindly agree to the Bluebird’s request so we did the show with these talented writer/singers.

Since there was a delicious week between the two… I got the lovely opportunity to squire Miss Georgia around London for the first time in her life… very economically I might add.

We went to The Eye. For you non- world travelers… that is that big Ferris wheel thingy that you see every time some movie has London attacked by aliens. It IS an easy target. It looks delicious from the air. We got to the Eye and found it surrounded by food carts… so we had ourselves a nice breakfast while we planned our own alien invasion.

We got closer to the Eye and found it surrounded by tourists. It had a line that makes the line at Space Mountain look like the line at Granny Clampett’s Sex Emporium. (Underrated tourist destination, by the way). We saw this sign that said “Fast Track” so I checked it out. For a phenomenal amount of money you can buy a “Fast Track” ticket where you can just walk up and get into one of the cars of the wheel and head off into the sky for a grand view of the whole of London.

We always knew we were going to come back from this trip broke. It always happens when you go overseas and here is why:

1. Their money is not real money. It is large pieces of paper which pictures of people that kind of look like your relatives.
2. Their coins are really heavy. There is a reason they are called pounds. That is their net weight. If you have twenty pounds of coins in your pocket… you have to distribute them evenly on both sides of your body or you fall over and get run over by a lorrie. I am not sure what a lorrie is but there are signs about them everywhere so they must be dangerous.
3. Their money is worth a LOT more than our money. I don’t know if we blame Obama, Bush, NAFTA or The Masons for this… but no matter how many US dollars you pile in front of them to exchange… they give you back two pounds. “Eight million US dollars? Here you are…Two Pounds. Cheers!”

The word “Cheers” after that transaction does not make it feel better. That’s the equivalent of a biker beating you senseless with a pool cue in the back of a bar and then saying, “Have a nice day.”

We walked over to Buckingham Palace. That place is HUGE. It’s like a… castle… or something. Then we walked a bit up to the tube station only to find it closed for repairs so we got a little confused and ended up walking about thirty miles in a circle… hopping on a bus and riding it out of town… finding a tube station only to find that our hotel is only a couple of blocks away from Buckingham Castle. This city is not exactly laid out like a grid.

We headed out to the O2 where the C2C was being held in the PM with a bunch of country music VIPs. Did you understand ANY of that? C2C is the big London country festival… like CMA fest with posher accents. Carrie Underwood…Little Big Town…all the biggies. Our show was in a small venue that felt like the real Bluebird. it went great. The audiences over here LOVE great songwriting. They enjoyed my songs too.

The tip off of how the day was gonna end should have been the fact that the cab we took out there had to drop us off very far away. That meant, when the gig was done and we were all drained and spent…we had to carry our heavy guitars and hike for miles and miles looking for a cab that would take us home. We eventually found one about a block away from our hotel and collapsed.

Now we say a temporary goodbye to London. (Georgia has fallen in love with this city like I did on my first trip here. For me it was the charm and the architecture. For her it was the hotel bellman, Saurvio.)  We are headed to Dublin.

Not done yet? you exclaim silently, as you ask yourself if this blog is ever going to wrap up? Nope. The Belfast Songwriter folks kindly bought our tickets for us, so we have to fly in and out of Ireland. We are going to be in Dublin for a few days before we finally head home… and see if Bucky remembers what I taste like.