06-23 You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

Karen's turn to blog about the end of our Canal Boat adventure and our first day in Liverpool, home of The Beatles.

We are up at 7am today. We get breakfast and organized. It's not raining as we leave at 9am. No locks, no swing bridges today. As for me, I stay inside for the half hour cruise and bag up anything not done last night.

We pull into the dock at 9:30. By 9:50 we had the car loaded and called the owners. After chatting with them about the boat and the weather we hit the road to Liverpool at 10:15. Right on schedule.

We arrived in Liverpool at 11:15 and grabbed a sandwich at Subway.

We arrive at the Premier Inn at noon but the room is not ready yet and they do not have any discounts to the Beatles Story. After parking our car at the Eco Arena parking garage we went into the Beatles Story.

They had a good audio to go with all the exhibits. They told the story of how John and Paul met and then how and when they met George and Ringo. Then you entered different mockups of Mathews Street, The Cavern, the Yellow Submarine, and the white room with a piano.

They did a very good job of telling the stories including their original drummer, Peter Best, and their manager, Brian Epstein. At the end they had four circular areas, one for each of them that told about their life after the Beatles. It included family, career, and things they had done for the community. It was a great introduction to everything we would be doing tonight and tomorrow.

Next, we checked into our motel. It was in the same building as the Beatles Story. We had to go get the car at the garage to bring in our stuff then we drove down to the extra exhibit, Elvis and the Beatles.

We started with a photo exhibit. Cool candid shots of the Beatles that were just found two years ago. Then into a 4-D not-so-great motion movie where the boy needs to get to the show to play guitar. Beatle songs help get him there.

The exhibit tells about Elvis' influence on the individual Beatles and about their meeting in 1965 in Bel Air. We left when it closed at 7pm.

We had dinner at Pizza Express right by the parking garage. They had WiFi so we checked email. We hadn't had Internet for a week. This is when we found out that Pat's car was missing (it has since been recovered). We were able to get an email off to dad with the info he needed and to do a quick check with Mike and Brian to make sure they didn't have it.

Now its off to the (new) Cavern Club. Wow, the Beatles started in a place like this? They played 292 shows here. (The original Cavern Club was filled in during construction work in 1973). The new one used about 50% of the original site and recreated the room that the Beatles and others played in.

Off in a different room, off to the right of the room where the Beatles played, we heard a very good Beatles cover band. They did the early years including She Loves You Yah Yah Yah and Penny Lane. They took a 35 minute break and come back and did the later years. They played from 9:30 - midnight.

"George Harrison" & "John Lennon"

"Paul McCartney" & "George Harrison"

The band was great with really good harmony. The singers made their voices sound like each of the Beatles. The room was small, the chairs were just hassocks; four around a short table. It wasn't the area where the Beatles played, like they implied. The band did an encore that everyone wanted to hear: Twist and Shout.

When they finished we went in the recreated Cavern Club room and that band was singing Twist and Shout on the very stage that the Beatles played on.

This band wasn't as good as the band we had just heard but they were singing Beatles songs on the stage where the Beatles sang 292 times.

Names of bands that played in the Cavern Club are written on the wall behind the band.

It was a great ending to our day. We were there till just after midnight then walked home in the rain. What a fantastic evening.