After landing in Berlin and picking up our rental car, we made our first drive to Dresden. After driving behind some trucks at around 90kph, I took my opportunity on the autobahn to push it close to 200kph, which is around 125mph. And it was smooth, both with the rental car and the borderline perfect roads, but honestly there’s no reason that anyone should be driving that fast in their normal life — not to mention how much gas that burns. So I’m finding my middle ground bouncing back and forth between living behind semi’s and passing when it makes sense, but not really going above 80 really. That doesn’t stop supercars flying by us at 125-150mph or so, but that’s their problem.

We got to Dresden and met up with Lars, the friend who is to blame for all of our excursions in Germany. He’s behind K&F Records who we’ve worked with for our records in Germany and these tours after meeting him in Columbus when his wife was doing post-doc work at OSU, around 2016/17 somehow? He got us settled into an artist’s apartment above a theater, and we caught up over ice cream. We’re both pretty clear-eyed about the state of the small-time live music industry — tl;dr it’s unsustainable for most people. We hope to at least break even this tour, but it’s always a risk, definitely even harder now than it was four years ago. But we love the music, believe in the songs, and would like to give it our best.

Lars arranged an amazing dinner at a nearby restaurant with the whole cast of Dresden friends from throughout the past years. Hanna, Hannes, Ronny, Elmer, Annette, Lars’ wife Nelie and their daughter Ani. Ani is about as old as my niece now, and I remember getting a text from Lars when they moved back to Germany, mentioning that they were with child on their flight back home. Wild how time works.