Yesterday, a friend called and told me he thought Jimmy was flying into Santa Barbara this morning. Since it was a holiday, I made a couple of phone calls to some fellow club members and we met early this morning at the Santa Barbara airport.
We were hanging around one of the private air terminals keeping an eye on incoming flights. Finally, after about an hour and a half we see Jimmy’s Falcon coming in. We watch it taxi in and a Mercedes SUV is driven out to the plane and in jumps Jimmy. We all headed over to the gate we anticipated them to exit from and sure enough, he comes the Mercedes SUV with Jimmy driving!
As he pulls through the gate, we gave him the universal Parrot Head “Fins Up!” signal…at which point he starts laughing, pulls up next to us, lowers the passenger window and states, “HOW do you guys find out this stuff?!”
We welcomed him to Santa Barbara and each had some memorabilia signed. Jimmy said he was meeting his editor to do some work on his new book. We asked if he had a minute for a few photo’s and pulled over and parked. We were able to get a couple of pictures and Jimmy asked if we were attending any of the upcoming shows…a couple of us are going to Vegas and all of us there are going to Anaheim. He was surprised we had tickets to Vegas…to which I replied “I won them on Margaritaville.com!”
We also gave Jimmy one of our club T-shirts…he was the FIRST person to get one!
The Tiki Gods were smiling on us today! What a cool way to kick off a week of Jimmy Buffett concerts!
Mike Billings
President
Santa Barbara Parrot Head Club