Following the bad weather

At times on this tour it feels like we are following the bad weather around. I can't really remember a day that didn't involve some form of precipitation. We had a few hours of actual sunlight leaving Berlin on our way to Amsterdam. Possibly for the first time all tour we were running on time if not ahead of time when we got pulled over by the German police. They pull in front of you and never really put a siren on but they flash an LED message. I was driving at the time and Kamil had to explain to me that they wanted me to follow them to the next rest stop where the police station was located. They asked to look in back. It never hurts to have the tuba the first thing an authority figure sees. It's my theory that Drums And Tuba never had any boarder troubles for that reason. What's more innocuous than the tuba? Once the cop saw the equipment he told me to shut the door. I was afraid of a real search but I think it just looked like too much work. Next they took all our passports and the papers to the van and my drivers license to the station and presumably ran our identities. After a while they gave everybody but me their stuff back and they told us to follow them back a few exits to a weigh station because we looked overweight to them and they wanted to check out how we tipped the scales. We drove onto a large platform and then waited for calculations to be made as the policeman scribbled furiously on a pad. It turned out we were a little over a hundred kilos over what they said was our allotted weight. The young blond policeman smiled and put one hand over one eye and said,"I think we look z other way." We were now running late, exacerbated by the snow storm that hit us just as we were leaving Germany and lasted all the way to Amsterdam. It was slushy flakes all night long which wasn't great for the audience size. Of course there's always a viable excuse for why a show is sparsely attended. Excuses can always be manufactured...