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Tour Diary
Read all about it and click on photos for full image
Just to prove that I really was there, my name on the sign outside! Not quite "up in lights" but every step forward on the musical road is to be treasured and savoured, and this night certainly was. A great Toronto venue, lovely atmosphere, terrific audience, excellent sound system, very well set up for folk music - a night to remember and a fantastic way to kick off this year's tour.
The lovely and talented expatriate Aussie Emaline Delapiax who opened for me at the Hugh's Room launch was persuaded to join me in the last song of the evening. Appropriately the song we did was I Am Australian, one of the people's candidates for official Australian song, not that the politicians ever listen to the people!
And speaking of Wawa, we visited the friendly and hospitable town on the shores of Lake Superior for a memorable evening with a really appreciative audience. Later in the night, fortunately after I finished performing, there was a terrific storm. This is the start of that storm build up, taken shortly before dark.
A nice trip to the country,in this case Sudbury Ontario on the way back from Wawa. This was the sign outside the Boops Diner where they went to considerable trouble to look up a genuine Australian meal to put on the menu in my honour! Not something anyone's done for me before, the best I've managed so far has been a Fosters or a glass of Australian red, not that they aren't welcome.
The City Wide City Roots festival is held in the Distillery district of Toronto, down near the waterfront. It's a fascinating old area, but it made me wonder how much the people of Toronto drank if they needed a distillery this size! Great festival and as always in Canada lots of friendly and hospitable people. Also very friendly and hospitable wasps that wanted to share my chicken sandwich.
One of the really nice people I've met in Canada, Richard Flohil. A great character who's seen and done it all in musical presentation and publicity and who has been a source of very interesting stories and sound advice on my trips to this part of the world. The photo was taken at a bbq at Greg Quill's lovely place at Niagara On the Lake. Greg's an expatriate Aussie and a fine musician in his own right. Unfortunately Greg was busy with the bbq so he isn't in the shot, but the food was terrific!
I seem to be able to find unusual places to play wherever I go. This was another first, a horse barn in Sarnia Ontario. A very enjoyable evening with a lovely crowd of people, not the least of which were the hosts Hedda and Bob Nicol. Certainly not a gig I'll forget for a while.
So here we are in beautiful downtown Cobourg Ontario. It really is a very pretty town with lots of interesting little shops and a coffee house venue that made us very welcome. At some point in the evening someone said "turn around and look through the window" and I did and Ros took this picture. Unfortunately most of my face was obscured by the flash relection. On the other hand, perhaps that's an improvement!
So here we are in a lovely little spot called Gananoque, also known as the Thousand Islands. Amongst the prettier places we've been on our travels. I've been parked in the hotel for several days, trying to catch up with the mountain of paperwork and email that touring generates, and the weather has been a bit ordinary. Then this morning we looked out of the window and there was a thick coating of frost on all the cars, but the sun was shining! So we ventured out to take some photos.
This is part of the Thousand Islands region. Here you can actually have your own island, although it may not be very big and when winter comes your neighbours can walk across the frozen lake and annoy you. Still, an island is an island, and there aren't all that many people in the world who can say they've got one of their own..
To the residents of North America this is an unremarkable sight. However, to a pair of Australian visitors stuck in a traffic jam on a sunny although cold Saturday afternoon, it provided an amusing diversion from the dreariness of making forward progress a metre at a time.
And then, driving around Brantford Ontario we came across this sign. Interesting to note that all the destination cities are in the same direction. I'm sure it must prove something, but I really don't know what - we just thought it was curious.
I played at the Hamilton Folk Club in Hamilton Ontario, held in a pub called the Pheasant Plucker. The walls had these really fascinating murals on them, which I thought would be far more interesting than yet another picture of me sitting on a stool holding a guitar. Not that anyone could possibly get tired of pictures of me........
And on the subject of pictures, this was taken at Zeke's Galley in Montreal. My first visit to Quebec which is a little different from the parts of Canada we've visited on previous tours. The walls were covered with paintings in a style we hadn't seen before, with the paint enclosed in a sort of plastic wrap and still soft to the touch, which adds a curious tactile experience to the whole thing.
I did a radio interview in Brantford Ontario and just to prove it Ros insisted on me posing outside for a photo. Now remember it's late October in Canada, there's a breeze blowing and it's bloody cold! At least, it is by the standards of any self respecting Australian! If you look carefully you can see my teeth gritted to stop them chattering, and it's not even really winter yet.
I played for a really nice bunch of people in a little town called Camden East in Ontario at a place called The Bookstore. This venue is a browser's delight, absolutely packed to the rafters with what Ros calls "dustables". It's fortunate that we already have almost as much gear to carry as can be forcibly stuffed into our vehicle, or heaven only knows what Ros would have found that she simply couldn't live without.
Canada Geese are a very significant problem in Canada. There are all sorts of opinions and theories about them, and as with all these issues no-one is entirely sure who's right. What is certain is that there are enormous numbers of these geese, they poop everywhere and the tourists think they are really cute. At least, they think they're cute until they've walked across grass that several hundred of the geese have recently occupied! Tourists apparently also like to feed the wildlife, hence signs like this all over Canada, and not just about geese either.
All over southern Ontario we saw people doing this to trees, i.e. wrapping them up in what looks like hessian. We didn't understand what was happening until the first snows came, and then it was obvious. After all, we wear winter coats, don't we?
We had a few days to spare in the schedule, so we slipped across the US border to see Ros's brother in Novi, Michigan. I was foolish enough to ask questions about snow, seeing as how it started to snow while we were there and got quite determined for a day or so. Rather than explain the procedures, it seemed that a practical hands-on demonstration was called for. You may want to preserve this picture, because I assure you that there will NEVER be another picture of me shovelling snow as long as I have any say in the matter. For the record, it's a lot harder work than it looks, although in my case a longer handle on the snow shovel would have helped my aching back.
So here we are in Michigan and I've finally persuaded Ros to stand in front of the camera for a change. In her very fully padded jacket she looks a bit like a blue Michelin man, but she assures me the jacket was warm, and I have to tell you that it was really needed! The temperature was minus 3 celsius and when you add in the wind chill it got down to minus 10. For a warmth loving Aussie this is starting to get a bit serious, so right after this picture was taken I had to take Ros inside and pump Australian red into her. Wolf Blass, actually, and a lot cheaper here than in Australia, which I'm sure makes a strange kind of sense to someone.
So we're driving back from Michigan when it really started to snow. The police closed the highway for about 60 kilometres because it was too dangerous to drive due to lack of visibility in blowing snow. We were driving on back roads for quite a while and it was reminiscent of all those Australian dirt roads I've driven, not much grip if you try to do anything sudden and a fair bit of the time the front of the car is pointed in a different direction from the back. All that dirt road driving turned out to be good training for this, and we made our destination without serious incident.
This was the beginning of a 50/60/old country song evening at the Old Copper Kettle in Fergus, Ontario run by Terry Golletz, shown with me. Terry's a very interesting bloke, artist, excellent mandolin player, songwriter, photographer and a bunch of other things. The Old Copper Kettle is an English style pub, cosy and run by very hospitable people. This was a cold night, when we came out the temperature was minus 10 celsius and you can add (or rather subtract) another 10 degrees for the wind chill. Lots of snow on the car, in fact we had to "find" the car before we could head for the hotel. All interesting stuff, as long as you don't put the car in a ditch, at which point it can go from interesting to very serious in the blink of an eye.
Those of you who know my wife will be wondering how we are finding our way around all these unknown places, given that she is amongst the most cartographically-challenged human beings on the planet. This little wonder of technology is the answer. It's a GPS unit which tracks your current position, where you are trying to go and the points in between, and gives you instructions both by text on the screen and by voice. When we first got it, it had an American female voice which we christened Endora, after the mother in law in the TV series Bewitched. Then I downloaded an Australian female voice, so the unit is now called Noleen. Some of it's mispronunciations are so comical that you're in danger of running off the road while you're laughing, but that aside the unit is a bloody marvel and always gets us where we're trying to go..
The first time we came through Kitchener Ontario this was a flower display. Now with winter almost on us, it seems that the smiley face does duty in the snow as well. Just goes to show that if you really try you can make all sorts of things happen in ways you didn't expect.
Here we are in Ottawa Ontario, almost at the end of this leg of our travels. I played a very enjoyable gig at Rasputins Folk Cafe on the Saturday night and then on Sunday morning we got ready to check out of our hotel. Five minutes before we headed to the elevator for a baggage trolley all the power went out in the hotel. This is nice, thinks I, as I was in the bathroom at the time where there are no windows. Next thing the fire alarms are ringing. So we grabbed what we could carry, essentials like the guitar and the laptop, and headed down the stairs. Did I mention we were on the 14th floor?
We are herded out into the street with the few other guests who hadn't checked out yet, with light snow falling and the temperature around minus five degrees, and in the next few minutes no less than fourteen fire trucks and appliances turned up. They obviously were having a slow Sunday morning at the fire station! The problem apparently was a burst hot water pipe which had sprayed water on to the main electrical switchboard in the underground car park area. After two hours the fire brigade pronounced the situation safe and left.
So we're all standing in the lobby of the hotel when the electricity people reconnected the supply to the hotel. At this point there was an enormous explosion and the entire sub floor transformer literally blew up. You can see the scorch mark it left on the hotel wall from the fifty foot tongue of flame that erupted out of the car park entrance. Back came the fire trucks and we spent another two hours in the snow and the cold.
And when all that was finally over and we persuaded the fire chief to let us back into the building to get our things, we had to walk up fourteen flights of stairs, get our bags and walk back down. Who said travelling isn't fun?
Hedda Nicol
