Friday Fun

Friday morning, Brian & I got up early and had breakfast at the hotel. We then waited for the shuttle from Enterprise to come get us so we could pick up the cargo van. On the way to Enterprise, we told Adam, the Enterprise guy, all about why we were on the East Coast & about handbells. He gave us his card & I gave him a link to this blog. (Hi, Adam!)

After picking up the van, we put on our door magnets:

Now we're traveling in style!

From there, we drove out to Boyertown, where we met up with Brian Seeman, director of the Philadelphia Handbell Ensemble, who was kind enough to loan us bells G2-B2, plus some miscellaneous others, plus bass mallets, a couple of tables, AND made arrangements for us to borrow a 4 octave marimba from Boyertown Senior High School. (Thanks, Brian!!)

Why are you taking pictures instead of helping us load the van??

After Boyertown, we discovered that the marimba squeaks while we drive:

I said I wanted to record it and use it in a composition; Brian said, "You won't find it so amusing after 12 days!"

Next stop was the Steve Weiss Music store in Willow Grove, where I bought a C diatonic mbira because I need one for this tour and I left my C pentatonic mbira at home. DUH! The guy who helped us, Jeff, knows Tim the owner of Malmark and was interested in hearing about our tour. I sent him a link to this blog (Hi, Jeff!) and made sure he heard about our TV appearance. :-)

After Steve Weiss, we went to the Malmark factory in Plumsteadville, where we picked up two 5 oct sets of bells, a 6 oct set of chimes, a 2 oct set of bells, a cajon, and a bell tree stand. (Thanks, Martha!)

Tetris masters!

While there, I got to ring a G1!

Too much fun!

(We'll be back at Malmark with the rest of the band on Thursday to take a factory tour.)

From Plumsteadville, we drove to Manhattan...

Like driving in LA, but with more honking.

... where we picked up the big black suitcase from Barbara's hotel...

Doesn't look like much, but it was 70 lbs!

... and then drove to Poughkeepsie, where we met up with Susan Guse and unloaded the van into her office:

Hard to believe all of that fit in the van!!

After that, we checked in to our hotel & hit the hay. It was an exhausting day and we covered a lot of miles - about 300, according to Google Maps!

That's a lot of ground to cover in one day!

We had a busy day today, too, but I'll post about that tomorrow. Now it's time to bed - early day tomorrow because I'm playing some solos at St John's for their 9:30am service. 'Night, y'all!

-Michèle