Dateline: Aug 9 2019. Bishop, CA
Next month I’ll be in Edmonton performing with my new colleagues in the ESO, helping my kids adjust to their new schools, and helping my wife find her way in a new town.
But today we drove from Danville CA to Bishop through Yosemite. We had spent several days in the Bay Area visiting friends we hadn't seen since we moved away four years ago, using my childhood home as basecamp. In Yosemite we headed straight for the Falls and spent an hour or so playing in the bouldery river before piling back into the car for the afternoon drive to Bishop where I’d found us a motel for the night before our long next leg to the Grand Canyon and Springdale Utah (at the south entrance to Zion Canyon), where we’ll be sleeping tomorrow night.
Before Danville, we were in Beulah Wyoming visiting my side of the family for nearly a week. The family has a cabin - a modest house, really - in idyllic Black Hills paradise, Sand Creek Country Club. My grandparents used to live there and we’d drive out almost every summer growing up to stay for weeks playing, fishing, hiking, visiting… Now my mom is the owner and my brothers and I have made it our common summer rendezvous point a few times in the last several years. The brothers hang out, their partners catch up, the cousins play, the innertubes get inflated, the grasshoppers get trapped, the fish get caught, the touristing happens (Mt. Rushmore, Devil’s Tower, etc.), and we all go our separate ways again until the next time. Maybe New Year’s in a different city, maybe next summer back in Wyoming. We’ll see!
My nifty practice space behind the garage in Sand Creek
Before Beulah, my daughter performed in a pair of shows at the conclusion of her musical theatre camp in Kitchener, my father-in-law and his lovely wife visited from Ottawa to witness said shows, we had one last inter-family meal with my sister-in-law’s bunch in Waterloo, and one last sit-down with my mother-in-law in Kitchener, and one last fire pit party at which to burn a chunk of old-enough financial records — and one final oven spray-cleaning treatment to try to make that damn thing really shine — before handing over our rental-house keys and hightailing it out of Ontario to get this big trip finally started in earnest.
So much stress, so many feels. So much help from family and friends, so much uncertainty about what exactly comes next. I mean, we have our calendar already pretty fleshed out for 2019-20, but you know what I mean. New home, new job, new schools, new friends for all of us. Whee!
watch this space!