Day 2 Maidstone, UK to Amiens, FR

We arrived at Sam's sisters place in Maidstone at about 2am after the show and quietly put ourselves to bed. We woke up the next day, had coffee and toast with Nick (Sam's sister's boyfriend) and left to do the big tour shop. We stocked up on all the important food that is essential for the success of any tour; crisps, peanut butter, Rivita, 9 bars, energy drinks and chocolate soy milk... all extremely essential. We also needed to get reflectors for the headlight,s which neither of us could remember packing (turns out we had packed them and now have two sets, BAM!).

We gunned it straight to Dover (by gunning it I mean going the speed limit), arrived at the ferry port in good time and boarded the ferry. We were both well and truly pooped from working the day before and getting ready for the tour in the previous days, so we needed to get a bit of shut eye. We curled up on the two tiniest sofas of all time and drifted off while we made our way to Calais. We were woken up about 20 minutes before we docked by a bunch of screaming middle-aged Welsh women, who were completely hammered. They'd taken full advantage of the reasonably priced Bulmers cider and were trying to kiss as many people as they could before the ferry docked... god bless the Welsh.

We fired it right out of the ferry and headed to our first show in Amiens. The show was at the Grand Wazoo, where we had played before and was being organised by our friend Charles from the amazing band John Makay. We arrived when the venue had just opened and started to load the gear in. Charles arrived shortly after and bought us a pot of amazing food, which sat down to eat with everyone. The other bands playing that night were Urge, a free-jazz improv band from Caen and Carte Noire, a guy called Romaine from Amiens playing electronic\noise stuff.

We were still really tired before the show and could hardly keep our eyes open so we decided to go for a walk around Amiens. We've been here a few times but haven't really seen the city centre before ,like most French towns it's really nice. We came back to the bar and it was time for the music to start, both of the other bands were totally great. 

Soon it was our turn to play, we were still pretty tired  but as soon as we started playing we woke up. We played pretty well and people seemed into it, as it was Saturday night loads of the French people were hammered, it's really cool to see people having a good time! We finished playing and became tired again. Charles asked if we wanted to go and party with the other bands at another house or go home and listen to records and chill, we opted for going back to his place and chilling, we must be getting old! We packed up the car and said goodbye to everyone and drove to Charles' place. Charles was walking so he arrived shortly after. We sat and chilled in the kitchen then to our surprise all the other bands arrived and wanted to party. We stayed up and drank with the guys and listened to records. Went to bed at about 3am, we were super tired but happy after a great first day on the continent.