Another terrific breakfast at the Abel Hayward (during which, I called the Casbah Club and made a reservation for us to tour late that afternoon) , and then it was good-bye to Manchester. The basic plan was to get back to Liverpool, have a night’s rest before we had our big day of rehearsing with Maxi Dunn, then the gig that night. True to form, we took the basic plan and stuffed it very full of all the other wonderful things we could squeeze in (and this is why it took us all a good week or so to recover from this trip).
We took a train back to the Lime St. Station in Liverpool and got our things back to the Pineapple before taking a taxi out to West Derby Village and The Casbah Club. The Casbah was the basement teenage club started by Mona Best (Beatle’s drummer Pete Best’s mother). This is really where the Beatles got their start, first as the Quarrymen, and then as the Beatles. We’d visited here on previous trips ( this would be the *third* time for John), but this is a very special place–and when your tour guide is one of Pete Best’s brothers, you know you’re in for an entertaining time.
We really didn’t have any set plans for the rest of the day, so we did what one does if one is lucky enough to be in an interesting and new place and the sun is shining: we wandered along. We walked down the residential street to the little village center and came upon the Sefton Arms Hotel, which looked like a nice place to stop for a drink. The weather was fine, and so was their nice backyard.
We wandered about another 1/2 block on towards the village church and noticed a park that seemed to stretch endlessly. This was a perfect kismet moment, as Lauri had been saying on the train earlier that day how she’d love to have a walk in the countryside. The train rides often teased us with that lovely English Countryside that we see on TV shows, but this being a music tour, we were pretty much hovering around the city centers. It really felt like a gift: the day was entering that ‘golden hour’ of late-afternoon/almost-sunset and the park really did seem to open up as far as we could see—very much like stepping into an English landscape artist’s work.
After a goodly walk, and seeing some extra-fuzzy cows, we ended up at a manor house straight out of a PBS costume drama. We saw signs that said “Cruxteth”…I’ll have to look all this up on the internet to figure out where we were.
Then it was the long trek back to the Pineapple (with a taxi’s help), a late night just-before-closing dinner raid on the local “chippie”, and to bed.