I've done a lot of touring in my life - eight years and counting - and I've played hundreds of shows, travelled many thousands of miles, and dealt with a lot of shit on the way. But all of it - stranded in Italy, in hospital in Texas, lost in Switzerland, comatose in Glasgow - pales in comparison to August 3rd 2006. It kind of goes through bad into so-bad-it's-funny and then out the other side of that into plain old surreal. So, on with the story... The story left off with us in Talinn. We woke up at about 6am (after not enough sleep) at the house of George, the promoter from the previous night's show. Our final destination was Darom Festival, just outside Lithuania, Vilnius. That's quite a long way away from Talinn, so we had to get going. Together with his girlfriend Nastya we got into a car and drove to the bus station, intent on catching the 7am bus to Riga, where we were going to meet Andzs and drive down to the show. The first problem of the day was the woman at the counter in the bus station. Estonians have a reputation in the Baltic for being slow and are the butt of many jokes, but jesus fucking christ, this woman took 45 minutes to serve two people, who were simply buying single tickets. I could actually see her brain working. This meant we missed the time for the 7am bus, but we'd already heard that it was full in her laborious conversation with someone in front of us. Hmm. Small setback. When we finally got to the front of the queue, she told us (in her own time) that all the buses were full until about 3pm, which basically meant there was no way we could make the show. George had to dash off, but Jamie, Nastya and I retired to a coffee shop to consider the situation (en route we found this, which was pretty ace). Ferries, flights, hitch-hiking were all considered. We were also accosted by a fat Russian guy who was pissed out of his brains and who thought we were taking photos of him - he wanted me to wipe my camera for him. Weirdo. Anyways, we eventually decided to get ourselves back to the bus station for the 10am bus and just try and bargain our way onto it. In the end, with Nastya's saintly persistence and us waving all our Estonian cash about the place, we managed to get a ticket (right) and got on our way. Vegan breakfast on the bus consisted of weird long flat crisps in a box, which confused the hell out of Jamie. The journey down to Riga was pretty uneventful, apart from the bus getting hit by sniffer dogs at the border. On arrival in Riga our plan was to head for Andzs' flat and wait for him there. He was driving in from Cesis to pick us up, where he'd been at a Fonofest crew party the night before (and consequently had had little sleep and was more hungover than us). It was pissing it down with rain when we arrived, which destroyed the postcards in my bag, and we had to run the mile or so to the flat and then towel ourselves off when we got there. We made some food and relaxed with some Monty Python videos while awaiting our lift. Time slipped by... too much time. When we finally managed to raise Andzs on the phone, it turned out that his car had blown a tyre on route. He'd got it fixed (after being ripped off by a local garage demanding he buy four new tyres) and was on the road, but we were now running three or four hours behind schedule. Nevertheless we soldiered on, and (after a brief mishap with Andzs leaving his passport in the flat) we motored out of Riga (slowly, through rush hour traffic). Now, I know nothing about cars, don't drive, can't drive etc. But I do know that when your engine starts to smoke and stink to high heaven, then something's wrong. About 40km outside Riga that's exactly what started to happen, so we pulled over. The car had recently been given to Andzs by his older brother, and Andzs still owed him £200 for it (quite a lot in Latvia). I think he was getting less impressed with his purchase as the day went by. I should also point out that someone had written "Ting" in masssive masking-tape letters on the bonnet in Cesis, which is arguably my fault... Anyways, thankfully we had Jamie with us who is a car-whisperer, and after a little while fiddling about with the radiator and pouring water into various nooks and crannies, we were, apparently, good to get back on the road, now running just over four hours late. I gave the promoter in Lithuania a quick call to let him know, and he was totally cool about it all. We sped off towards the border, down the same road we'd followed a few days before en route to Vilnius. When we reached the crossing point, we assumed there'd be no problem. We were wrong. Partly because we were young and scruffy, partly because we had two British passports in the car, and maybe partly because we had "Ting" written on the bonnet, the Lithuanian border guy decided to fuck with us. After Andzs handed over the passports and the vehicle documents, he looked over the car, saw that the light-casing for one of the indicators had fallen off, and said (all this conversation took place in Latvian / Russian, so I paraphrase from later reports): "I've got no proof you haven't killed someone in this car." We were a little perplexed at this, and he just fucked off to his little hut with all our documents. Andzs went over, and he basically said he wanted money to give our documents back. Fucker! We told him we didn't have any Lithuanian cash, whereupon he told us there was an ATM 1km over the border, and said we should go there. On being asked how much he wanted, he essentially said "make me an offer". We drove to the ATM and got out about £10, drove back and offered that. He said "Is that all?", at which point Andzs started to lose his cool with this cunt. So he reluctantly agreed that, OK, he'd take the tenner, and then said "You're not even going to say thankyou?", at which point we found another great use for our knowledge of how to say "fuck off" in Russian. At this point we were about five hours behind schedule, which meant that we wouldn't make my stage time, let alone soundcheck. I called the promoter again and told him what had happened, and he, saintly as ever, said it was cool, the festival was running until 2am, and we'd sort it out once I got there. So we resolved to continue our nightmare journey. I rashly said "Think Black Flag" (a personal touring motto) and Jamie said "Well, it could be worse." Hubris. We set off at about 130kmh down a straight road, with fields either side. I was in the back and Jamie was driving, giving Andzs a break. I was texting a friend, when suddenly I heard "Agh! - AAGH!" followed by a massive thump, and the car skidding wildly from side to side. I looked up, shouting "What? What the fuck?" We careered to a stop just on the grassy verge. We hit a fucking deer. The full extent of the damage can be seen here. We hit a small baby deer at a sideways angle (we found its remains about 12 metres away from the road). If we'd hit it straight on, we'd be dead. If it'd been any bigger, we'd be dead. If Jamie hadn't been a fucking good driver... you get the idea (incidentally, Jamie was sat on the end of his seatbelt as the holder was broken). The deer was finished, as was the car, this much was obvious. Apparently they have a lot of problems with this in Lithuania - they don't do fences. A few years ago the Latvian Prime Minister's motorcade even hit a cow. So it's not unusual... still totally fucked up though. The next problem was that, even though we were only 20km over the border, we were still in Lithuania. Andzs doesn't speak Lithuanian, only Russian, and our recent experience with the Lit authorities had not been encouraging. We called the cops, and they were with us about half an hour later. It was dark and starting to get pretty cold. It took a long time for Andzs to go through all the paperwork, thanks to the linguistic barriers, and the cops seemed very intent on checking up on the deer too. They'd also not grasped on the phone that we needed towing somewhere. After some negotiation, they pulled the seatbelts out of the back of their car and fashioned them into a tow-rope. They refused to take us back to Latvia (which would have made life much easier) and instead took us another 20km into Lithuania, and dropped us at a crappy little hotel in a tiny town, whereupon they fucked off (but not before charging us about £20 in petrol money for towing us!!). We got into the hotel carpark for midnight. I'd spoken to the Darom Festival promoter who, while a little incredulous at what had happened, was very understanding about the fact we were no way going to make the gig. The next call was to Andzs' brother in Cesis, 300km away. He was also totally cool, checked we were OK and then leapt into his (new) car and drove out to find us. Legend. We passed the hours until his arrival sharing out the last of a lonely packet of crisps and bottle of coke in the car, and trying to keep warm. He arrived at about 3am and started the long process of towing us back to Cesis. I managed to get some sleep, but Jamie had to stay awake to steer the towed car. It took us until about 8am to get back into Cesis, by which time we were all pretty zombified. The next problem that arose was, that we were now at the wrong end of the country for the next show, which was in Liepaja, on the Western coast. So after grabbing some coffee and breakfast, thanking Andzs' brother profusely, and laughing about the fact that Andzs had only had the car for two weeks, we set out for the bus station. The journey from Cesis to Riga takes about an hour and a half. We got in, feeling pretty surreal, and noting that we'd been there about 20 hours previously and still hadn't slept properly or played a show. At the bus station we had to wait around a little for a connection to Liepaja, but we were soon on our way. Sleep still wasn't really forthcoming, as they're not the most comfortable of buses, and this journey was to the tune of four and a half hours. Our last arrival in Liepaja, in January, had also beena bit of a debacle, so it was with the humour of people at the end of their tether that we arrived. We walked into town from the bus station and finally, finally got to the venue - the infamous Fontaine palace - where we met Edgars and Skippy, who were waiting for us with no inkling of what we'd just been through. We got food, and then told all. Their eyes popped further out of their heads at every stage of the retelling of the story, and then they decided to cap it all with the punch-line. A friend of Edgars' had been at the festival, and apparently, before the time when we would have arrived if we hadn't hit the deer, the whole thing was shut down by the cops due to someone getting stabbed. So it would all have been pointless anyway. So that was it. The worst day (and a bit) of being on tour that I've ever experienced. It's kind of funny now, in retrospect, but there were certainly times during the process when my sense of humour started to fail seriously. My luck with Lithuania doesn't seem to be great. For clarity's sake, there's a map here of the entire thing, so you can appreciate how close we got, and quite how much fucking around we did in the space of about 36 hours. The next and final installment is here!