I got up at 6.30am (no surprise!) and left at 7.15am and it was still dark. Soon after I set out I went past a lake that had mist rising from it: The drive from Cleveland, Ohio to the East Coast was supposed to take about 8 hours but thankfully it passed quite quickly. (It was about 475 miles.) My SatNav said that I was due to arrive at my hotel at about 3pm so I stopped for about 20 minutes somewhere in Pennsylvania for lunch at a Wendy’s. At one point I went past a sign that said it was the highest point on the I-80 east of the Mississippi and there was snow on the ground there.

I was going fine until I hit New York City. In retrospect if I’d know I was going through the city, I would have taken another route around it as there was a delay going through the Lincoln Tunnel and then the police were stopping us easily accessing 34th Street to go through the Midtown Tunnel so that delayed me quite a bit. When I did get through there was another jam out on one of the parkways.

I got to where my hotel was supposed to be at about 4pm but it wasn’t there! I rang the hotel and he said that maybe I was in Queens and they were in Queens Village so I drove to the other street of the same name (about 20 minutes away) and the hotel wasn’t there either! I rang again and was told a road name that crossed it so I drove there and rang again to ask for directions. He told me to stay on that road for 3 miles before it intersected the road that I wanted. Eventually I found the hotel and it turned out that I was on the correct road originally but Expedia had the address as 220-16 so I put 220 into my SatNav and they were actually at 22016!

As it was 5pm by now and I wanted to leave at 5.30pm (the gig started at 7pm tonight) I just had a cup of tea and another one of Rebecca’s pastries and got changed. Thankfully the traffic was busy but steady on Long Island and I easily found the venue to get there by 6.30pm so I sat in the car and took some deep breaths for a few minutes! It was a lovely venue and I had a great seat right in front of Todd in the second row. It was raised seating so my eye line was about level with his groin! I’ve been to about 10 Todd Rundgren Arena gigs and this was easily my favourite. (There’ll be a full review on KasimInfo.com soon.) The gig finished at 9pm and I managed to get back to my room by 10pm. I had a cup of tae and watched something on the iPlayer and got to sleep by 11pm as I felt shattered.