Checking out of the Breidenbacher Hof hotel and not a moment too soon, it was goodbye to Dusseldorf and a train journey Southwards to Mannheim. Bernie's team dropped us off at the train station and we walked the few minutes to the platform and it wasn't long before the impressive ICE train glided in.







The train was much longer than we anticipated, our reserved seats being in the very first car meant a brisk walk to the very end of the platform. The first class carraige at the front has a unique feature, what appears to be a smoked glass bulkhead, is in fact a transparent screen so the passengers in the first compartment can see directly over the driver's shoulder.



This really does add a new dimension to the high speed travel offered by this monster machine. With speeds of up to 300kmh on this line, which incidentally we experienced several times confirmed by a speedometer in the main carraige, being able to see ahead mans you really do feel more of the sensation. The other thing that is noticeable is the inclines or gradients on the line. Some of the hills and valleys are actually quite steep and approaching them at such speed means they appear quite terrifying at first, something you'd never notice with the normal side windows. The only thing that betrays the train's pace is the fact that the line runs alongside many roads and we were passing fast moving traffic as if it was standing still.





We pulled in to Mannheim station two hours later and Gunther, Bob and Eike were there to escort us to the cars and drive us the 3 km to the SAP arena. The whole journey had been timed so that our arrival coincided with the kick-off of the England match.



Meanwhile, Angus serves up some Chicken tagine....



The whole crew were in catering viewing the game on an LCD tv hooked up to a laptop, receiving the BBC TV feed via an internet portal. This meant that the bandwidth requirement was high and occasionally the picture would freeze and someone in the room would shout "who the f****'s on skype!" A message went out building-wide to get off the internet whilst the match was on. We had already planned to sound check at half time which worked out perfectly. Apart from a ten minute reboot at the beginning of the second half we were all able to watch the nail biting game to its conclusion. The good news is that USA, England AND Germany go through to the knock-out stages. Lots of smiling faces around this evening.





The show was great apart from the initial shock of the sound for the first few songs, quite how it differed so much from sound check is incredible, Mark was clearly having trouble too and his sound will have been much worse than mine as he is at the front of the stage where any PA influence is exaggerated. I remain convinced there was a technical issue. All I could hear was ambience, none of Mark's guitar or vocal... the sound boys struggled to sort it out, and succeeded by half way through the show. I'm sure I'll hear what happened tomorrow. Then it was business as usual, fantastic fun as always and another fabulous audience showing their undivided appreciation. The runner back to Stuttgart and a familiar old hotel which used to be an Inter Continental meant a 90 minute drive. When we arrived in the town, we were greeted by thousands of cars causing traffic chaos waving German flags in celebration of their win. You'd think they's won the world cup..ah well I suppose they might as well celebrate now as Germany play England on Sunday and I fear it will be all over for them then! Deja-Vu anyone?



pic Helmut Mehen