Strasbourg, France

My son Nick makes his way back to the States this morning, an early flight from De Gaulle that sees us getting up at 5:30 a.m. Once I got him safely on his way, I went to the gym then back to the room for a couple hours extra sleep. I've got some kind of intestinal bug, feeling tired and out of sorts as they used to say.

We check out of our terribly fussy hotel in Paris, a real Chateau Chic, and we're all ready to move on to Strasbourg. This will be the first time I've been to the capital city of the Alsace region in north-east France close to the border of Germany. Unfortunately, there will be no time to see anything of it as we fly in, drive to the venue, play the show then do a runner to spend the night in Frankfurt.

The Zenith Strasbourg is a round, orange, corrugated building, very strange and is only a year old. The crew love these new venues because they're efficient, smartly constructed and laid out with truck access to the arena for convenient load in, smooth floors for rolling the hundreds of road cases that carry everything from instruments, sound equipment, lights, staging.....everything. It makes their job so much easier. Inside is oval, wide and relatively shallow, floor standing, seating back and sides with a capacity of 6,000. As far as I could tell there were no empty seats and the floor was jam packed. The audience was another remarkable one, a listening audience that erupted into ear splitting appreciation at the end of each song.

A real runner tonight probably due to take off restriction, a short hop to Frankfurt and a hotel that we all enjoyed very much last time we were here. Whatever bug has crawled inside me is still enjoying it's stay, so it will be an early night for some rest, bypassing the usual night-caps and tea.

So long,

Richard