Up the wooden hill to Bedford..
The trouble with staying over after a gig and heading to the next one after the hotel boots you out is you end up in the next place ludicrously early – unless you find an awesome falconry place near your destination, which is what we did with our early afternoon. So we had entertainment from an assortment of owls, hawks, falcons and eagles to tide us over until a reasonable time to be heading into Bedford – in the absence of any owls in the Owl Sanctuary the previous night it felt like balance had been restored!
Once we headed into Bedford I followed the Sat Nav to what it thought was Greyfriars car park, but it wasn’t quite right (we discovered after paying) so moved the car to the right car park which didn’t charge after 6pm and wandered to locate the venue before repairing to the nearly Ship Inn for a drink since it was early. Who should we happen upon shortly after arrival but Mick? It’s funny how that always happens! Haha, after drinking up in the absence of serving food we nipped a few doors down for a pizza.
By the time we’d finished that the downstairs bar at the venue was open so we headed there finding a few folk already there – not least Ellis and Dom playing pool, the rest of the band we saw heading out for food as we were heading in. Sue, Paul, Brian, Karen, Claire and assorted other folk soon started joining our merry band – tainted by the sad news coming in from Stevenage that Simon was feeling too poorly to make the trip up – get well soon, Simon!
Much fun was had with balloons from the halloween decorations, and the amazing discovery of what happens when you blow e-cigarette vapour into a glass (which I’m sad I never recorded now), before long it was time to head upstairs into the venue proper.