Courtesy of Iberia airlines, we´re spending the night in Madrid after missing our connection from Madrid to Rio today. Our flight, for which we had to get up at 04:30 - somewhat painful after a few (too many) leaving drinks last night - was late leaving Heathrow because the plane was “wet”. Yes, that´s right, the plane was too wet to leave on time. No, we didn´t know that was possible either.  

Nevermind, we got an extra night´s rest before the 10hr flight to Rio, with three meals thrown in by Iberia.  V´s very excited about the bed in our room - it´s wider than it´s long!! 

P.S. The Madrid airport is like a huge, not very well signed maze and the staff seems to be almost as confused about it as the passengers are - leave plenty of time if transferring in Madrid!

We’re in Ljublajana, Slovenia, for the Easter weekend and it’s been snowing really heavy, big, wet-tissue snowflakes all day so did a slow wine-bar-café-crawl and had lots of local mulled wine. Then the weather forecast for Rio (+31C, rain) got us quite excited!

Another really fun gig from Fran and the boys, playing songs old and new. The sound mixing was really poor though, and I especially noticed it at the start. However, the sheer enthusiasm of their performance annulled these problems, the guitarist even managed a crowd surf-whilst playing the guitar, Fran was all over the stage (and even fell over the drum stage), and for the last song, ‘Why does it always rain on me?’, Fran got everyone to pogo under threat of death by sniper from the celebrity box. Great stuff.

****

Rome, the eternal city. A weekend really isn’t enough as there’s so much to see, but it gives you a great taster of the good life. Everything was really fantastic, the only gripes were that the room+bed were Lilliputian in dimension, and there was some night bird from hell that kept making ghoulish whooping sounds all night long that echoed around the inner courtyard of the pensione.

Wilco have to be one of the best bands around that I know of. Years of experience, beautiful mature songwriting, endless sonic experimentation to add texture to the songs (and they do it live really well), blistering solos, mellow moments, rocking moments, Jeff was in a good mood too so fun banter with the crowd…these guys really are a class act.

*****