While I had a few meals with locals as I cruised through Berlin, my favourite meals that I shared during my two stops in Germany were beers with my volunteers.

The shows in Berlin and Gelsenkirchen were two weeks apart, but the experience was remarkably similar. It rained heavily the day before the show, cleared up and was fairly nice on show day, and the crowds, as one roadie put it, “know how to hang out”. After both shows there were solid crowds of people mingling about and having a last beer before heading home, and when our work was done at both shows, some of the volunteers who had worked a hard day stayed around a while to have a beer.

I suppose I wanted to seek out meals with locals as a break from the tour, and despite the fact that I was still at the stadium with people who had been working at the concert, both nights felt like more of a break than the meals in Barcelona, Milan, and Paris. The group was relaxed and just happy to be spending a couple of non-structured moments with each other. So prost to all the Germans I shared a cold one with, hope to see you next time I roll through.

Cross posted from The ONE Blog

I have a catch phrase that’s served me well along the U2 tour: “It’s not gonna rain.” Thus far with that phrase and the collective will power of tens of thousands of fans, we’ve managed to keep the rain off of us despite what the forecast said. I suppose I should have been saying, “It’s not gonna rain, and there won’t be gale force winds.” But I didn’t, and so that was our weather for the first day in Gothenburg, Sweden. You can get a sense of the conditions from the picture above from when we were unloading in the morning.

But the rough and rugged ONE volunteers braved the wind and the rain, and still managed to sign up hundreds of new ONE members. I was as impressed as I was cold – I’d packed for a summer concert tour and lacked the proper insulation for the 17C windy soggy day.

Everything changed for the second day in Gothenburg. The skies cleared, the wind stopped, and we were in serious business. We doubled the number of people we signed up, and after the concert still had the energy to share a few laughs and a some Swedish gummy candies – Gott & blandat, which I highly recommend if salt liquorice sounds good to you.

It’s now onward back to Germany, where I’m meeting up with a couple members of the German team for a show in Gelsenkirchen. With any luck it’s not going to rain (again).

In 2004, I spent a very bohemian month studying French in beautiful Nice. This week I spent a few short hard working days there, and it was a wholly different place.

I arrived a bit bedraggled and tired after my challenging drive from Paris, but was determined to see a bit of the city that I had loved so well. I headed off in the evening to meet up with a co-worker in the middle of the city, but couldn’t hail a cab from the area around the airport where my hotel was. I asked myself what I would have done 5 years ago if I needed to get across town in a hurry, searching for that carefree mentality that had helped me make the most of my time here. So I whipped off my shirt and joined some people running and rollerblading down Promenade des Angles. It was prefect and reminded me why I loved Nice, a beach town that’s glamorous, but also laid back enough that you can take a midnight jog surrounded by crowds of tens and twenty-somethings settling in for an evening on the beach.

But diving into the town’s nightlife slowed my re-enchantment. We headed back to a couple of bars that I remembered as being good rowdy fun, but found them pack with overly drunk British and American teenagers complaining loudly and falling over themselves. It had been fun when I was that age, but now just seemed a bit sad. It was a lesson that a place will never be the same the second time.

I love a good challenge, and the effort to transport about 6 cubic meters (a large van full) of stuff from Paris to Nice on short notice during a national holiday provided an exceptional series of challenges.

The first challenge was to transport the stuff 1.5 Km from Stade de France to my hotel at 3 AM. Thankfully, there were a load of crew hands around. After chatting with them for a bit and with the people managing them, I received some free assistance pushing all the the equipment (thankfully everything fit on 6 flight cases with wheels) to my hotel – picture of this effort above. About 45 minutes later I paid my cheerful helpers with beer, orange juice, and candy bars, and convince the hotel to let me stash all of the stuff in the hotel conference room until the following evening. One down.

The second challenge was to find a way to transport all of the kit down to Nice, 950 Km away. Something told me that 5 set of helping hands wouldn’t do the trick this time. First thing in the morning my colleague help ring around to various “man with a van” services while some co-workers in London tried to find a suitable rental van. After just a couple of calls we realized that there was no legit service that was willing to do the delivery the next day – Bastille Day, the biggest national holiday in France. A while later we found that there were no vans to be rented in all of Paris. When continued searching all day in vain.

At 4:30 in the afternoon a glimmer of hope appeared as we found the last van in Paris – it was far to large and very far away, but it was something. I hopped in a cab and raced over. Upon arrival at the supplied address however, my heart sank. It was Rue de Rivoli 93 – the Louvre, which, in case you have never been, isn’t a van rental agency. I went in anyway and much to my surprise found that two floors down where the tour buses park, there is indeed a van rental company. I grabbed my vehicle at the last possible moment, loaded up my kit, and went to bed for an early departure the next day.

The drive down to Nice was a bit wet in the morning, but pleasant enough cruising through France and surfing local radio. The truck was a bit unwieldy in the cities, but proved to be a capable beast out on the road. The rain cleared as I left Lyon and found myself driving through Provence on a perfect afternoon. But then 7 hours into my 9 hour drive, the next challenge arrived. With the fuel gauge still reading 1/4 of a tank, the van started to sputter and stall. I was lucky enough to be right next to an exit, and pulled off the road. I hopped out and opened up the fuel tank, which was empty as I had feared. Checking the dashboard again I saw that the fuel gauge now showed 1/8 of a tank. At least it was optimistic.

I was blocking the exit, so I hopped out and with adrenaline surging, pushed the van back 15 meters out of trouble – to the spot you see in the picture. Then I turned to the phones, and with a little help from friends with access to a French land line that could dial local toll-free numbers, managed to explain my situation to the rental agency and also contact emergency services to dispatch a crew that could give me some diesel. I have never been happier to have studied French. A couple hours later I was back on the road with Hertz covering the cost of the breakdown as the emergency services technician explained that there was indeed a fault with the fuel gauge.

It’s the type of trouble that I like to get in while I’m out on the road – challenging, but with no imminent threat to my health or well being. It was stressful, but sipping a beer that evening it didn’t seem like a half bad couple of days.

Cross posted from the ONE blog

Phew! The U2 360 Tour has been fun, exciting, and a ton of work. As you know I’ve been traveling with the tour from city to city signing up ONE Members, coordinating volunteers, sorting out logistics… and “Kissing the Future”.

After the tour’s launch in Barcelona, we headed to Milan, Italy where lots of volunteers turned out to help sign up concert-goers to become ONE Members. One really cool thing about the volunteers in Milan was that it really seemed to be a family affair, with parents showing up with kids in tow just to help out. It was great to see different generations coming together to work as ONE. Some of the youngsters were pretty shy at first, but I found the trick was to get them out of their parents’ shadows, and then they really started to get into the fun. As more and more concert-goers poured in, I found the inter-generational dynamic of the volunteers actually perfectly reflected the make-up of the crowd, with people of all ages coming to enjoy the music and—assuming we did our job right—learn a little about ONE.

After Milan we headed to Paris for a couple concerts at the Stade de France. Stade de France is that it’s not only the biggest stadiums I’ve ever been in, but one of the biggest structures I’ve ever stood in, period. It was absolutely huge. While an awesome sight, this also made coordinating ONE volunteers that much more difficult. Security was also an issue, not leaving us with much room to catch eager U2 fans as they made their way towards the stage. Fortunately on the second night we went TO the crowd waiting in lines outside the Stade and signed up hundreds of ONE Members.

From Paris we headed south to Nice, which ended up being a bit of a trick in terms of transporting all of our tabling kit. I ended up enlisting the aid of a crew of men in the middle of the night to help me push a cart of equipment back to my hotel, then hired a van with a faulty petro meter to drive down to Nice. But once I was there, it was amazing. Informally referred to as U2’s “second home town”, The crowd there really treated U2 as one of their own and the atmosphere was very warm, pun on the 34 C weather not intended. Just as the other stops along the tour, lots of music and lots of sign-ups.

From Nice we went to Berlin (which Carola was kind enough to write about here) and then to Amsterdam for another two concerts. There we set up kiosks inside the stadium as there was absolutely no space to set up our tents outside. Interestingly, the security there asked that we not sign people up to become “ONE Members” but asking that they sign a “petition” was perfectly okay. With a little finessing, everything worked out. I also followed the old rule “when in the Netherlands…” and hired a bicycle for my stay in Amsterdam. While I normally have to take taxis to freight my equipment from place to place, I managed to load most of it up my bike and cruise around on the beautiful bike path between my hotel and the stadium. It turned my otherwise stressful commute into a peaceful morning and evening ride.

All in all, a very successful tour so far, with over 16,000 sign ups by the end of Amsterdam. I’ll have more for you from on the road soon!