The next day, after a leisurely lunch of sandwiches de poulet we are driven to the tiny airport in Bron that services the private jet crowd. It’s not what we expect. There’s just a bare little space with a counter, like the Alamo car rental office at a run down regional airport. We’re a motley group, a little disheveled, everyone in shades, Carina, the background singer, with toddler in tow. A contrastingly well put together family is coming in from the runway at the same time, father with sleek, brushed back long hair and sock-less slipons, mom with understated elegant traveling ensemble and twin little girls in white linen dresses. This is what private jet travelers are supposed to look like.

There’s a single small jet out the window refueling. It’s really small. Alarmingly small. The pilot comes in. He’s a tall German, relaxed, confident, top of his white uniform unbuttoned. He ascertains that we are in fact his clients and invites us out to the plane which is apparently nearly fueled up. The tone of this world starts to come into focus. It isn’t diffident or condescending as it first seemed, rather it’s casual, assured. It reminds us of the old Ladies Room skit on SNL. We are guests in a private club. If you are here, you belong.

Newbie tip, if you happen to gain entree to the private jet club, nothing gives away your arriviste status quicker than having to open your luggage on the tarmac to get the liquids out. That was us. Private jets fly at around 40,000 feet and their luggage section isn’t pressurized. In other words, your little bottle of shampoo is a bomb. It has to come in the cabin. The protocol is the exact opposite of commercial. Going through private security on our post-gig flight to Valencia no one blinked as a cardboard box with an open bottle of bourbon and two Malbecs bobbled through the scanner.

Flying across France was gorgeous. At 40,000 feet you see the curvature of the earth and yet there were no clouds to obscure the patchwork of Burgundian farms below. No clouds, that is, until Brittany. Suddenly, there was a dense, solid cover, like the potatoes on a shepherds pie or the crisp on a fruit crumble. The flight attendant came out from a consultation with the pilot and said, and I am quoting exactly here, “We’re going to try and land but the weather is really bad down there.”

What?

Wait. What does that even mean? “Try?”

Of course, she meant try to land at the intended airport with plan B being a landing at an alternate strip. But in the moment, as pretty fearful fliers (as at least three of us were), this was bad. We were white-knuckling the entire way down. It was the scene from the movie “Almost Famous” when the band thinks the plane is going down and everyone confesses their deepest darkest secrets. We descended through clouds, seemingly forever. And then, with almost no warning we saw and touched down on the runway at the same moment. The visibility was zero, cloud sitting on ground. We’ve all been through dozens of instrument landings flying commercial, all I can say is in private it’s a different thing.

But we were down.

We played the show in the Carhaix rain and got Mercedes SUVs back to the airport for another quick and painless flight and another SUV. And in the morning we woke up in our hotel in Spain. A couple days later we flew to Tel Aviv (commercial coach, and wow, was that a come down) for a show at the Menora Mivtachim Arena. We all stayed at the same hotel in Israel, the exquisite Setai in Jaffa. All was, at least for the moment, right with the world.