Zotzensee

We booked this hotel in Hamburg for one night as a convenient stop before continuing to Hirtshals the next morning. That was the plan. Instead, our band van broke down somewhere in the middle of a cornfield near Bremen. What followed was an entire night spent trying to find a rental car large enough for a band, several people, guitars, amps, cymbals, luggage, and the shattered remains of our optimism. We eventually ended up at the airport hotel in Bremen, where the very kind staff allowed us to sleep in the lobby until the car rental desks opened at 9:00 AM. “Sleep” might be a generous description. I spent most of the night staring at the GPS on my phone, repeatedly calculating the absolute latest possible time we could leave Bremen and still make the ferry from Hirtshals. At 9:00 we finally got a rental car. Unfortunately, it was approximately the right size for a small family going grocery shopping — not a touring band with half a music store in its possession. Two band members had to abandon ship and fly home. The rest of us packed ourselves into the car using techniques normally associated with Tetris, then drove for seven hours virtually non-stop towards Hirtshals. Of course, not everything could fit. So somewhere at a workshop in Bremen, part of our tour is still living its best life: drums, a speaker cabinet, various cables and — perhaps most importantly — a collection of bags containing several days’ worth of dirty band laundry. We can only apologise to the me