Day 6 - Essen/Uhlenkrug

Definitely the best food today. We drove out of France and had to make it through Belgium once again. We stopped at a gas station with a restaurant on top. Thomas and Andrew got fish, Doug got a burger, and I got schnitzel. It was weird because at this rest stop you could buy beer and wine and they had the appropriate glasses for them. So strange. The food was fine.

We got back into Germany and made it to our gig. It was an old timely schnitzel house with family styling seating, and four choices of drinks: Beer/radler, Coke, wine, or water. That’s the norm here. Some places it’s literally coke, the local beer, or weird fizzy water. We ordered schnitzel with potatoes. When we got it it was amazing. It was two giant pieces with these incredible potatoes, plus a salad. The sauce was a peppercorn sauce. It was the best but I ate too much.

The gig was fun. We had a few people sit in including Rick Alan on alto sax, a German guitarist and singer also (forgot their names). We had met the singer at the Swordfish. He apparently plays bass too but recently broke his shoulder. He sang really great.

At the end of the night we stopped at some Turkish place. I didn’t get food but tried their tea. Pretty good. We then went back and the night was over.

Just wanted to mention we met a 95 year old WWII vet at the gig. He fought on the Nazi side and was imprisoned for three years by the Russians. He was very nice. What wasn’t nice was the weird drunk artsy guy who kept trying to touch my earplugs.Read more