Day 10. Head back to Mull via the Ferry and then drove on to Glasgow, where we stayed at the hotel where Roy Rogers had walked Trigger down the main staircase. The evening's concert was Karen Matheson and another member of Capercaille (blanking on his name at the moment). Awesome stuff ( Read more... )

Day 8. We started off the day with an hour for retail therapy in Inverness, and then traveled down the Great Glen and the shores of Loch Ness and Loch Lockey. The original plan was to lunch at a neat old hotel, then tour Glencoe and head down to Oban to catch a late ferry to the Isle of Mull. But gale force winds altered the plans, as a tree was ( Read more... )

Day 6. Off to tour both Balmoral, the Queen's Scottish residence, and the Glen Grant distillery. We don't regret Balmoral (and indeed are glad we went), but the audio tour guide was so boring and poorly done as to be very amusing. ("And here is the Garden Cottage, so named because the head gardener lived here, except when the Queen's lady in ( Read more... )

Day 4. We left Edinburgh, following the path of Jim's song Losin' Auld Reekie. We made our way to Murthly Castle, a private estate whose grounds were opened just for us so we could have our own private mini Highland Games. Our instructor was Susie's dad, who was the 1972 world caber tossing champion. We were also entertained by a piper and a well- ( Read more... )

Day 2. Checked out of the B&B and headed to join up with the tour. We were all meeting up at the Whiski Bar on the Royal Mile to have a bite to eat, get our welcome packets, and headed out on the first adventure. We stopped to drop our luggage off at the hotel and were pleasantly surprised to find our room ready early, so we tucked our luggage in ( Read more... )

On May 15, Chris and I headed to the airport for a long planned and long anticipated vacation in Scotland. When Jim and Susie Malcolm announced plans to organize a musical tour of Scotland over 18 months ago, we signed up immediately. We were in Scotland six years ago and while we had a great time, we had difficulty finding traditional music. So we ( Read more... )

Chris and I vacationed in Scotland May 15-27(more on that later), and a taxi picked us up at 7:00am at our Edinburgh hotel to take us to the airport. We flew to Heathrow, where we had a four hour delay while they wrestled the forward cargo bay door into submission (it didn't want to close), and we made it to Chicago and cleared customs just as our ( Read more... )

Chris and I spent this weekend at Leprecon in Phoenix, where once again, Arizona fandom has proven to be a mixed bag. (I blogged about earlier experiences back in July 2009). Although there were a few shiny, happy moments, Arizona fandom did not perform well when given a chance to redeem itself ( Read more... )

Sunday started with co-teaching the collaborative song writing workshop with Dene and Sundara of Ghost of a Rose. We talked about different ways to collaborate, then split folks up to write lyrics to a tune or music to go with lyrics. It was cool seeing what people came up with - and Jane and Errol (? do I have that name correct?) you really need ( Read more... )

The open filks were lots of fun, and I was in circles friday, saturday, and sunday nights. Saturday night in particular was one of those truly magical filk circles where it turned into a filk jam as much as a circle, with lots of folks joining in on many of the songs ( Read more... )