We’re in the United States!
After a hectic week, with house concerts and preparation (and lots of friends wanting to see us before we left), we left The Hague at 5AM on Sunday. We had managed to save some money by flying from Brussels to Frankfurt and then to Newark. All this while my hometown is a 15 minute drive from Amsterdam Schiphol airport…
I like to travel light, but knowing I have a photo shoot coming up this week without knowing what kind exactly, I stuffed as much as I could in the biggest suitcase I have, feeling a bit like the diva Cleopatra Francis keeps joking about. The suitcase weighed 21 kilos, which is a lot more than I would ever care to carry for fun. To make matters worse, Francis asked us to bring an old laptop for our tracks. My mother once bought a laptop when I auditioned for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, but never used it; my friends and me always joke that she’s afraid it’ll explode (which she confirms by the way). I now have that laptop with me, so even my hand luggage weighs a tonne!
After a long but pretty smooth journey (ok, our flight in Frankfurt got delayed due to another plane blocking our way), we arrived at Newark, where Francis’ tour manager Kate would pick us up. Remco has met Kate once before, but wasn’t sure if he would recognize her. He said she would carry a sign with our names, and I joked the sign would say “Cleopatra and Remco”.
After some massive queues for border security and customs or whatever you call them (we were definitely in a wrong queue; the one next to us was literally ten times faster than ours), we were happy to finally be on American soil! We started looking for Kate, and I instantly knew I had found her when I saw a woman holding a yellow sign with golden letters saying “Cleopatra”!
After some coffee, we drove to Francis’ house, where we were welcomed by Francis’ wife Erica and their kids. While Francis had a house concert, we all had a wonderful home cooked meal without him.
After dinner, Remco and I had a drink on the porch, just being in awe about the millions of fireflies in the forest we were looking out on, listening to the frogs, and just knowing we were about to have a great time working on this album here!
