Taken while on a mini-tour with Herman Dune in the UK. On the deck of the awesome venue, Thekla in Bristol.
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While in Wales recording with Herman Dune at Bryn Derwen Studios, we went for a walk up the hill and found this lovely creature.
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End of the Road Festival: The view out of our hotel room window while on tour with Herman Dune.
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[I’m starting a new feature on Wednesdays, posts about travels that we have taken over the years. Either together or apart. Hope you enjoy it!]
If you haven’t heard of Swoops, you should check out this site.
This Bird is Pissed.
My brother TJ took the above screengrab from a video of an attack. The dude in the foreground is laughing at another dude that just got dive bombed. Little does he know, he’s next.
Watch the video below.
oh! p.s. in response to Andrew’s last post, I must not be civilized. Someone must have eaten my yogurt yesterday :P
–c.
This past weekend went by so fast! I’m sure it’s because we actually did something. Friday night we drove to Toledo, Saturday morning we went to the Indiana Dunes State Park on our way to Chicago to see the Eccentric Soul Revue Presented by The Numero Group. Right after the show we drove 4 hours back to Toledo and woke up 4 hours later to drive to Cleveland for the Cavs game then out to a late lunch with Andrew’s brother and his girlfriend! Whew. But we’re getting too old for this. It totally kicked our asses. We got home and went to bed at, no kidding, 6pm and woke up at 6am.
BUT I had an amazing time and it was so nice to be in Chicago again with friends, eating good food and seeing amazing music. It was even nice to take a long drive (though Andrew might disagree with me since he did the majority of the driving.) If you haven’t heard of The Numero Group, you should check out their site here. I can’t describe them better than they have themselves, so you should check out their “About” page. Their mission statement being:
“…to dig deep into the recesses of our record collections with the goal of finding the dustiest gems begging to be released from their exile on geek street. No longer would $500 singles sit in a temperature-controlled room dying for a chance to be played. No more would the artists, writers, and entrepreneurs who made these records happen go unknown and unappreciated.”
“Numero releases are sound with substance, living at the nexus of song and story. Scrupulously researched, painstakingly re-mastered, and with an attention to detail that is unmatched in the reissue field, the end result is a top-of-the-line compact disc.”
Highlight of the show being:
• The Notations, singing and dressing like bands don’t anymore: matching blue suits with black patent leather shoes without a trace of irony.
• Syl Johnson. I can’t even pull out points from this performance. I was amazed that he is still doing what he does at his age. And scared because he is still doing what he does at his age. I don’t mean to sound rude, but I was surprised he didn’t throw out his hip with all his gyrations and hip-thrusting.
• The brass section. Serious.
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If you have a chance, you should see this documentary. You can find out more information about it here. We were fortunate enough to have seen this movie two weekends ago at the 33rd Annual Cleveland International Film Festival.
It’s a documentary about a community and what happens to when its livelihood is threatened. It takes place in Cairo, a city of 8 million people with no official garbage collection service. For decades, the Zabbaleen, a community of about 60,000 people, have become the unofficial garbage collectors of the city. They’ve made their living collecting and recycling the trash of the residents of Cairo. But in more recent years, they’ve had to compete with foreign garbage collection companies contracted by the government to do the job they’ve built their lives on. The film focuses on three young Zabbaleens and follows them as they “come face to face with the globalization of their trade.”
“Each of the teenage boys is forced to make choices that will impact his future and the survival of his community.”
It’s a fascinating film, not only the overall story but the boys have such character it’s hard not to find them endearing.
–c.
So I haven’t had a minute to try to figure out the “Read More” thing. BUT yesterday, in my Blogger frenzy I forgot to mention that I changed some comment setting so now anyone can comment and also you can link back to any posts you want with the little “Links to this post” link (too many “links” in this sentence) at the bottom of every post. If you’re confused by what I just said, just look below this post and you’ll figure it out.
Since I haven’t figured out how to do the “Read More” thing, I’m going to have to post many Amish Country photos in a row. So here goes:
I’m going to work backwards in our trip, because I think it makes for a better starting point and ending.
These are some kids hanging out next to the country store. There was one little girl, who was probably about 7 or 8 years old, shopping for groceries with another little girl (about 2 years old) on her hip. She looked like an adult! I don’t have a good picture of them so this will do instead.
Ashery Country Store was our last stop on the trip and it, as you can see, has bulk foods. I’m not sure if they make all these goods, but the hot cocoa mix looked suspiciously like Swiss Miss. Guess we’ll never know. I got a bag of chocolate covered almonds and some raw sugar. Andrew stocked up on “special” flour and such.
This is the parking lot of the Ashery Country Store. Special parking for the horse drawn carriages. I don’t know a whole lot about the Amish other than what I’ve observed, and that isn’t much. So if I’m misrepresenting anything in anyway, please feel free to set me right. But I swear I saw more than a few buggies driven by Amish men drinking Mountain Dew or Canada Dry or coffee out of a styrofoam cup. Is this allowed? I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, but it sort of makes you do a double-take.
Speaking of carriages, we rode in this one. (In this photo it looks like the horse is about to take a mad dash and the carriage is teetering on two wheels!) Andy is the horse’s name and the driver is Lester. Seems like it should be the other way around (no offense to anyone named Lester!). I felt a little weird riding in the carriage because I wasn’t sure how the horse was treated. The driver seemed nice enough and there are horses EVERYWHERE in Amish Country pulling carriages. But the fact that we were tourists of sorts felt like maybe it was more carnival ride and less necessity for transportation.
Last but not least is Lehman’s. This is a huge Amish Department store. Even though I did see a few Amish people browsing and probably buying, I have a feeling it’s not where they would go to get a bargain. Lots of cool stuff, for sure. I mean, it’s famous! People come from all over the place to shop at Lehman’s.
Abigail weighing herself at Lehman’s and below is a really neato display of yard sticks.
