North Wales 19-21st May 2017
Another fantastic weekend – this time in North Wales! The ladies left their homes all over the country in miserable rainy weather and arrived, several hours later, in beautiful warm sunshine! So much for it always raining in Wales!!
Catering, as ever, was brilliant – so we won’t tell you what we had to eat each day as you would only be jealous! But rehearsals started on the Friday night. Jane introduced a new Klezmer piece to us which is going to be fabulous. And Because this was the first time for us to perform in Wales, we had introduced two Welsh pieces into the repertoire at the last weekend, so we were busy getting those up to scratch.
Saturday was a day full of rehearsals and we were all very tired by about 4pm, so we had a lovely break, with time for a walk in the sunshine and a nice meal before setting off for Bangor. Because of logistical difficulties, the accordions were all ferried over to Bangor in one car, courtesy of Jeremy, and we were reunited with them at the Chapel. It was a really lovely concert – not a huge audience, but we played really well and the audience were totally engaged from Karen’s first joke right to Annie’s gaffe at the end! And there was a lot of hilarity in-between too! Such was the way that adrenalin works its magic, a large amount of wine and cheese were consumed at Felin Bach before tiredness overcame a few, but rumour has it that the others got their accordions out and carried on playing until 3am! Spare a thought for the poor Brownies who were trying to sleep in the other half of the hostel! Sunday was a beautiful sunny day. Rehearsals again in the morning and then off to Conwy. Martin and grand-daughter Phoebe did a wonderful job of trying to encourage people to come in, out of the sunshine and through the door, ably abetted by Ruth who provided accordion music in the background! The size of the audience was disappointing, but again everyone was totally engaged from the word Go and it was a lovely atmosphere. Everyone managed to catch their trains or drive home safely – Elspeth had a swim in Padarn Lake on the way and stayed in so long that it took her the entire journey back to Liverpool to warm up!
Another wonderful weekend!
