Greetings from a grey, cloudy, cold and wet Confederation Helvetica. Always a tough time of year to get through! Its been a while. So, snuggled up with a warm guitar in my new home, I’m reflecting on a fabulous year and wondering what you are all doing and playing these days. How’s the progress? Feel free to post here and share, would be great to hear from you. Missing many of you!
After getting my family from Canada and Spain together on Crete for a wonderful spring get-together and a really nice summer outside on the tennis courts and having Neil, Nani, Corina and Marc Weston visit for a few days, I had a great and memorable summer trip to TG Central, to see Bart in Arizona, Craig in San Diego, Jason in Ventura and all the campers at this year’s camp in Monterey accompanied by Corina. And I had some one-on-one lessons with Neil which was a blast!
One of the great things in life is the amazing hospitality of the Americans I have met. This summer just proved it all over again. Neil and Nanni, Bart, Craig and Jason are the most hospitable and kind folks. I really can’t sing their praises enough, showed us a wonderful time. Fell in love with Arizona even at 46 degrees C! Well it did cool down to 40 at night. Just don’t touch anything metal!!
Lounging in the pool every night for an hour or two with an iced drink helped . Getting to play with Bart and Craig and Jason and meeting their lovely wives was just wonderful. Bart took us to an Eagles cover band concert first night in Good Year that was just fabulous, they were perfect. A trip up to beautiful Sedona was a highlight with a trafic jam trapping us in the truck for an hour in 40C heat but the aircon was strong so we just got Bart’s Taylor mini out and played some songs. Wonderful! We also visited Bart’s favourite guitar shop in Phoenix and played some beautiful guitars including a 14’000 buck McPhearson which was a dream to play. Bart has a couple of nice guitars at home too . I really enjoyed the Musical Instrument Museum too, well worth a visit. I knew Bart was special first time I read his forum posts, in real life, he is even more special…. everywhere we went, Bart was getting hugs and warm greetings from everyone!
Bart then drove us to San Diego to the do the Taylor factory tour and meet Craig. This was cool as was playing some of the guitars after the tour together. Back to Craig’s for the best margaritas EVER! Craig`s wife, Patricia was dealing with the California fires (as a dispatcher with California Fire) the whole time we were there and helped us plan our trip up to Ventura making sure there were no fires on the way…. but we still drove by a new monstrous fire an hour into our trip. Horrendous!
At Jason’s (music Junkie, or MJ) we had the International Space Station fly overhead while playing songs in the back yard. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to finally meet Craig and MJ after so many years on TG. They are exactly the wonderful people I knew them to be.
The ride up highway 1 to Monterey was just as memorable as 30 years ago… a must do!
Camp was too much to take in in only a few days, overload all-round! So many great people to meet and play with and listen to. The open mics are the heart and soul of camp and so much fun to take part in. There were some stunning and memorable performances, Neil and Corina on Ocean Gypsy and Bob Abraham with his self-penned song (Gumby) are just 2 that stick with me as do the late night last-man-standing jam sessions with Dave Nach, Jeff, Geoff, Dan, myself, Corina, Vanessa, Wiley and TG’s very own Jameela! Of course, I am missing out so many, for which I apologies… as I said, it was over-load most of the time. I was stunned by the mastery and excellence of the whole teaching staff. I learned more in a couple of singing sessions with Jim Bruno that I could ever imagine possible. He transformed my ability to sing right there and then… and I can’t even tell you how, it was pure magic! I was in the hands of a master.
And all too soon, it was over, back home to 7 weeks of solid work with no day off, a price I was more than willing to pay! Since then I have reduced my working week down from 6 to 5 days and hope to get down to 4 sometime end of next year and ten sometime down to 3, I don’t have the intention to retire although I am getting up there these days. Just need more guitar time .
I’ll add some pics and videos on this thread as soon as I get a mo….
