Adventures and Dinosaurs

Hey from Locarno! I’m standing right at the front of the Grand Piazza with a bunch of Deep Purple stans (even mix of middle aged men and teenage guitar nerds) so let’s write about today so far.

After a great breakfast (being a nun must give you a brutal appetite) we left the hotel and decided to scale a mountain. So we took the cablecar thing to about 1600m high, and that wasn’t epic enough so I decided to walk an extra hour among some massive scenery to a height of about 1800m. It was pretty awesome (dig the photo of me sitting at the top). Then we walked back down, had a schnitzel (still at 1600m) and made our way down, via a pretty old church where the virgin Mary appeared a good 500 years ago. Wonderful architecture. No holy visions though.

Then we spent a few hours in a pizzaria here in the Grand Piazza, eating and drinking and getting ready for the oncoming baldheaded hurricane of fist-pumping awesomeness that is Deep Purple and Foreigner. And that brings us here. This crowd is awesome… There’s bandannas, Twisted Sister shirts, and HEAPS of long hair and alcohol. Everyone kind of looks like the neighbourhood bully from an 80s film (or a relatively well-off European 40/50-something).

Tonight after the show we drive straight to Milan Malpensa airport for our early morning flight to Vienna. With about 4 hours in the middle to kill. Maybe I’ll write a comprehensive review of the gig or something.