Thursday, November 23
Somewhere in Germany

I'm staring out the window from a train in Germany, looking at the parapets of a small castle across the river while my wife Deanna dozes next to me. Deanna and I are heading back up to Haan after visiting some friends in Bad Kreuznach and dropping off the vehicle I had for the tour. She got here three days ago, and is almost adjusted to the Euro-schedule. She's admiited that she's particularly glad to be done with the driving part of the trip, though. To say that German highways are intense is like saying that OJ Simpson is kind of a jerk. Example: yesterday I passed a police car at about 100 mph, which was perfectly legal. Stranger than that, we were in the middle lane and people were flying by us on the left. We're not in Kansas anymore.

on stage in Haan

It has been a beautiful tour, reconnecting with some old friends and meeting some new ones, working on improving my rather unimpressive German language skills and playing a lot of music. The shows this year were the best they've been yet, not only in terms of attendance and CD sales, but also the music itself, I think. That's once it got started, anyway. The beginning was a little, well... adventurous.

I drove all day from Florida on the night before I was scheduled to fly to Germany, had dinner and a too-short visit with Deanna, then woke up the next morning, quickly repacked and headed for our tiny airport in Asheville. I checked in and flew to Charlotte, where I killed a couple of hours waiting for the flight to Frankfurt. Then my flight was called and I handed my passport and ticket to the attendant as I have so many times before, having no inkling that her next words would be "Umm... do you realize that this expired yesterday?" All the blood that had formally lived in my face ran screaming for some safer territory as she handed my passport back and I saw that yes, it had expired in October 2006, and this was Nov. 1. My first thought was - that's the tour. It's over before it started. It will take at least a couple of weeks to get a new passport, and by then most of the scheduled dates will have already passed. I've got to call Christian in Germany, who worked so hard to organize it, and tell him I'm not coming.

I called Deanna at home and told her what had happened, then MJ, who offered to come in to work in the middle of the night to help me sort out what had to be done. MJ found the phone number for the passport office and I called to see what I could learn at eleven pm.

And here's where the story really gets surreal. OK, I'll be honest about the fact that I haven't been too happy with the course our country has been on in recent years. Sometimes I fantasize about just relocating. But let me just take this moment to say - on the record - that I'm giving my country a big point:

It's the only country I can think of in the whole world that would have customer service representatives available by phone at the passport office five days a week UNTIL MIDNIGHT. How amazing is that!? I told them what was happening in a nutshell (that I was scheduled to be on stage at the Maldix in Germany in about forty hours and had managed to space my passport expiration), and they bent over backwards to try to find a solution. To cut to the proverbial chase, after trying DC and a couple of other cities, they found me a one o'clock appointment the next day in New York City.

fall has fallen at home, but it's still Autumn here

Next - the flight counter. They actually re-routed my flight so that I could go through New York with a twelve-hour layover, then sent me home on the last flight back to Asheville. No extra charge.

MJ came to get me at the airport, where we discovered that my bags had not come with me. We did the necessary tracking stuff and then she drove me home, where I laid down in my own bed for an hour and twenty minutes, then - got up again for the early flight to Newark - caught the train to the city - found the passport office - ducked into a Chinese restaurant for some lunch - worked through the passport process for four hours - caught a train back to Newark - got on the plane to Frankfurt with my new passport, about 25 hours after I had tried to board in Charlotte.

Christian translating, or maybe just making fun of me...

Of course none of my three bags arrived with me, so I filled out more paperwork then took a three hour train ride, was picked up at the station by Helmut, the concert promoter, and arrived two hours before I was supposed to go on stage for the first show of the tour. I made it. And best of all, Christian had brought one of my guitars back with him to Germany when they visited this summer, so I even had a guitar to play.

checking options for a more Euro-chic style after a show.
Puts a new spin on what folks call me here: Herr LaMotte (or is it Hair LaMotte?)

I guess this tour was meant to happen. At the moment I learned that my passport expired the odds against it were certainly high. There certainly were some sweet moments. And some of the best ones weren't even on stage. The tour was based out of Haan, a small town near Köln (Cologne) where my friends Christian and Sonja live in a house that was apparently built around 1430 (no kidding - their house is almost three times as old as our country). Though I've been to Haan several times before, this was the first time I had gotten out to hear much music on my nights off. Haan boasts some pretty incredible musicians, and their hospitality equalled their talent. We had great fun sitting around in the neighborhood pub playing old American covers and turning each other on to songs the others didn't know.

We got to celebrate Deanna's birthday this week, too, and having Christian and Sonja's son Jonathan around made the party much more fun, as children do with birthday parties. His second is coming up soon.

I heard some cool news from home last week, too. The Songwriters Association of Washington DC is holding the awards ceremony for their annual song contest Dec. 3, and wrote to me to tell me that I had received the Silver medal in the Instrumental category for the song Madison's Tune from my latest record, Change. They called it the "perfect piece." Nice to hear that. What was better, though, was hearing that Keep the Change, also from the new record, won the Gold in the Folk category. In this contest there are thirteen categories, and they award three 'Overall' prizes, First, Second and Third, which they don't announce until the awards ceremony, so keep your fingers crossed for me, huh? I'll be flying up there to attend the event, which will be good fun, regardless of whether I win any other spots. And it took an event that special to pull me away in December. I've been hard on the road in recent months, and it's time for a little down time in Black Mountain, which will start on the day after tomorrow when Deanna and I pull in our own driveway.

The new year is promising to be a busy one, too, and I'm grateful for that. I went through a little soul-searching recently, trying to figure out if it might be time to answer some other kind of call and move on to other work. I came to the clear conclusion that I still love it and want to put in at least a few more years. Thanks for making it worthwhile.

Frieden, Leben und Leidenschaft,

David

P.S. Now it's November 25, a couple of days later. We headed for the airport at 4:15 this morning, with current passports and luggage, only to find that the flight was canceled. An extra train ride and a long flight later, though, we're about to touch down in Charlotte, NC. Das Leben ist schön (life is good)...