Music festivals, jams, open mic’s, shows, camp sessions, etc.
We have a connection in Saskatchewan with my friend Terry, whom we met almost two years ago in Memphis. Terry lives near the city of Prince Albert, SK and he has a boat on Waskesiu Lake in Prince Albert National Park, so our week-long stay in the park gave us opportunities for a few convenient musical meet-ups.
Continue reading “Prince Albert National Park: Waskesiu Lake Blues Cruise”
Flin Flon is totally, outrageously cool. Flin Flon, Manitoba/ Saskatchewan (pop 7,000 and yes, so cool it spans 2 provinces) is a mining town with an obsession for music. We loved it! And we fit right in.
First, some background…
Riding Mountain National Park opened in 1932 and is the oldest national park in Manitoba. It rises 457 meters (1,499 feet) above the pretty flat prairie in all directions. At its center is Clear Lake and the town of Wasagaming. Its most recognizable feature is a line of cliffs along the eastern border formed by the Manitoba escarpment.
We planned to visit. Our new friends from the music festival confirmed it was a must see in Manitoba. We set a course.
Our approach to non-planning our trips always includes having a list of music festivals and dates handy so we can be on the lookout for where our trajectory might intersect a festival. Most recent example: if we bypassed Winnipeg on our first pass (planning to double back to visit later), we could attend the Prairie Wind Music Festival in Cypress River. To continue a theme from the previous post, Neil Young wrote about this town – the town where his dad grew up – in his song ‘Prairie Wind.’
In the early 1940s my grandparents bought a cattle ranch on the San Francisco peninsula, in the Santa Cruz mountains west of Palo Alto, off of the California 35, which is also known as the Skyline Boulevard. My mom and her sisters and brother moved to the ranch at relatively young ages and did most of their growing up there. Eventually my grandfather left the ranch to pursue other ventures, while my grandmother decided to stay put and established on the ranch a nursery specializing in California native plants.
We met Malcolm and Judy while riding tandem bicycles just a few weeks before we got married, so this friendship goes back 31 years. They recently retired to Sedona, Arizona where they’re exploring their new southwestern playground and remodeling their new home. From Lake Powell, we were so close that not visiting was not an option. Delightful visit!
Last October in Memphis at the Blues Guitar Unleashed (BGU) Live gathering, several of us jammers stayed at the Tom Sawyer Mississippi River Campground in West Memphis, Arkansas. Among that crew were Michael (known as Stringbreaker on the BGU forum) and his wife, Kat. Michael and Kat live in Moab and they told us we should stop by if we were ever passing through there. Ding ding ding!
Continue reading “Jamming with Stringbreaker”
This is our first visit to Utah canyon country, and likely not our last. It’s magical! And we’ve only just begun…
Our foray into New Mexico was actually another blues guitar visit. We’ve met my friend Steve twice before in real life, and he and I have been friends online through the BGU forum for several years. Steve told me, in a reply to a forum post I made last year in which I detailed the states we planned to visit, that there was a mistake in my list – I’d left out New Mexico. Well, to me that sounded pretty close to an invitation to visit the legendary Compound within which Steve and his lovely wife Hyacinth reside, and I vowed not to make that mistake again this year.
Regular readers may recall that last year took us through Colorado’s Front Range area, where we met up with my BGU brothers Chris and Frank for a drive-by blues jam. Well, that was so much fun that when the map for our trek to Utah began to take shape and quite naturally aimed itself for Denver, it was an easy decision to try for a repeat. An excellent time was had by all! More pictures below.