Celtic Spring Band ::

It is the fourth of July, Celtic Spring has just finished performing in Ohio and Pennsylvania, we leave for Australia in a week, and we are enroute to Ontario, Canada for the Leahy Fiddle Camp.  I finally have a long day on the road to update our journal.

 

March was a very busy month for us and a highlight was performing at one of our favorite Irish Festivals, the North Texas Irish Festival in Dallas. We always love opportunities to share our music and meet other musicians.  We had the great pleasure of meeting and listening to Altan, the traditional Irish band from Donnegal. Mairead, the lead fiddler and singer, invited Elizabeth, Deirdre, and Sean to dance on stage for a great set of reels. Sean and Patrick informed us that they had some very late night sessions at the hotel, jamming to 4:00 a.m. with other festival musicians. We also enjoyed Sunday brunch with Greg's parents and extended family.

 

Then we continued on to Alabama for a performance in the old and lovely city of Florence, which, Scooter Muse, the presenter, told us was a lively haven of country music. Then on to Birmingham for a "live" performance on the cable TV station, EWTN, with first a stop at Our Lady of the Angels Shrine and Monastery in Hanceville. The Monastery is home to 40 cloistered Poor Clare nuns of Perpetual Adoration and during our previous visit to the shrine we were invited to perform for them, including the founder of EWTN, Mother Angelica. This time the nuns did not know we were coming, so we spent time in a quiet visit with prayer and confession.  We wanted to let the nuns know we were there, but did not want to bother them without warning. (We were just a little too timid to ring the doorbell of the cloister!) We left the Shrine and were nearly to Birmingham when we got a call from our contact at EWTN, Amalia, who said that the nuns were expecting us.  We happily turned back for the 45 minute drive back to Hanceville to visit with the nuns and perform for them in their parlor.  Instead of dragging my large keyboard across the very large piazza to the monastery, we asked the nuns if we could borrow a keyboard.  They cheerfully shared theirs with me.  It had a few fewer octaves and was easy to place on top of a table.  It is hard to imagine more joyful faces than all those young nuns--- the average age of the nuns is 26 years old!

 

In Birmingham we appeared "live" on "Life on the Rock" to a wonderful audience of friends who came down from Canada and Indiana to join us.  The show aired all over the world and we heard from kind viewers as far away as India and Australia, Ireland, and South Africa.

 

We were home for a few days to catch up on work and play in an Ojai youth symphony performance before leaving for Arizona.  We had a great time performing in Sedona, Flagstaff, Cottonwood, Prescott, and Green Valley, and exploring Indian dwellings, hiking,(I sprained my ankle while hiking in Boynton Canyon, and had to keep on hiking!) and eating at our new favorite veggie restaurant in Sedona, D'Lish, and spending time with Grandpa McCauley, who even liked our  veggie restaurant! (We ordered him rice noodles with vegan meatballs, quite an adventure for an Irishman.) Upon leaving Prescott and heading to Cottonwood, we decided to take the short cut over Mingus Mountain to get to Mass on Palm Sunday.  We were told that a storm was coming and that snow was possible.  We Californians did not have any concern and looked forward to seeing some snow.  As we headed up the mountain the snow got deeper and deeper with no other tire tracks.  Then the road started getting slippery and the mountain road, steeper.  We were concerned that turning back would have us late for Mass, yet we knew that good St. Michael (our large black Sprinter van) was probably not up for the slippery mountain adventure.  We turned back and hurried to the highway route, making it to Palm Sunday Mass late in very cold, wet weather.  In Prescott we had said good bye to my dad, Grandpa McCauley, but he surprised us at our Cottonwood show.  He is one of our biggest fans!  In Green Valley we were joined by our agent, Pat, and his family, and also friends of Greg's that he knew while growing up in Indiana. We ended our Arizona tour with Mass at San Xavier del Bac Mission.  (We are ever grateful while touring for our lap top and broadband internet cell phone connection that keeps us ever informed about mass times and veggie restaurants, our staples while on tour.) 

 

Our next tour took us to New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.  We flew into Newark arriving in the evening in time to catch dinner in Times Square in New York City.  (We either like bustling cities or pastoral countryside.)  One of our favorite things to do is to arrive in New York City and go in search of great pizza!  It is amazing how that city never goes to sleep!  Then a return to East Hartford, Connecticut where the presenter, Roger Moss, treated us to warm hospitality, and Joe Renzoni treated us to some great photography that has made it to our photo gallery.  Then on to the Catskills where we had a little holiday in Ellensville.  We found a wonderful, real New York bakery for breakfast and some great pizza for dinner sandwiching an amazing hike to and through an ice cave.  We headed up a mountain road in heavy fog and began hike in fog so think our children were disappearing before our eyes.  We heard there were some ice caves, having no idea what they were.  (We were told they were closed because of the ice, but thought we could at least peek in.)  As we hiked the fog cleared bit by bit until we came upon the caves.  With our insatiable curiosity we thought we would just go in a short distance.  Though there were sheets of ice on the ground, there seemed to be plenty of room to walk around the edges.  We kept on going, and going, and going. Soon we were deep inside the cave, but still managing well until we came upon a narrow suspension bridge that was covered with a sheet of ice, with very little light.  It seemed like we had gone too far to turn back so we kept on going, feeling like we were characters in the Lord of the Rings. The bridge was  narrow and rickety, with rope for the sides, so we helped Maire and Aidan not slide right into the abyss. As we got deeper and deeper into the cave, the ice got thicker and thicker, until at last we had to go up a steep path covered in ice that concealed the way out.  Patrick bravely ventured on ahead and happened to have a stout stick with which he continually hit the ice until there came into view a narrow opening.  Greg, Patrick, and Sean helped to pull us up as gravity and the ice wanted to pull us down, but we at last all made it out into the fresh air and back where we had begun.  We do like adventures!

 

We ended our spring performing in southern California at the Costa Mesa Highland Games.  We shared an evening performance with Alex Beaton, and shared our stage for the weekend with good friends, and incredible Scottish musicians, Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas. Sean and Patrick were especially delighted with spending the weekend in the company of Alasdair's son, Galen, who has long been their friend from summers spent at Alasdair's summer camp, Valley of the Moon.  There were also other good friends from Valley of the Moon at the festival, Ian and William Muir and Rose Rodgers, so it was a bit of a VOM reunion.  We had a wonderful dinner together on Saturday night at the hotel.  Admidst all the merrymaking, Sean and Patrick were doing math homework and quizzes since they were in the middle of a month long, intensive, "year long" college algebra class.  Besides this festival, all the boys did for the month was math.  They would leave our home at 6:20 a.m. and return home at 10:30 at night.  We were all glad when the class was over and one week later we left for our summer tour.