What a great day! Despite the exhaustion we had a fantastic time. The Folk in the Foothills festival is held in the small town of Jamberoo. The scenery is breathtaking! Huge thanks go out to Russell & Dave from the Illawarra Folk Club who invited us to play (and organised for us to have a shower, champs!).
Our first gig was at 10:30am. Thanks to audience member John for the brilliant unrehearsed introduction! I particularly liked John's method of leaning over and whispering, 'How do you pronounce your name?!' The gig went really well and we played to a full house, so much so that extra chairs were needed! Afterwards we had about an hour to get some food before settling in for the afternoon program. We made the executive decision that seeing language-loving musician and comedian Martin Pearson and New Zealand based Maori Celtic group Pacific Curls was the way to go, particularly because we were playing after Pacific Curls and I love their sound. Martin rocked his show. It was just brilliant :) I love the fact that he rivals me in the hair department and forgets words to songs! Makes me feel less alone :)
Our last and final gig of the festival and our tour took place after Pacific Curls late in the afternoon. We video-recorded it especially for Mannie! At one point I asked the audience to file past after the gig and say 'Hi Mannie!' into my camcorder, but Bridgey had a better idea. She counted to three and the entire audience roared, 'HI MANNIE!!!' Even still, after the gig we still had people who stuck their heads around my camcorder and cheerily said hello anyway (we had no idea they did this until we viewed the footage taken after we'd gotten back home!).
We were then asked to play two numbers in the Evening Show (Caledonia and the Ocean Set for interested parties) which was an absolute blast! It was roughly 7:30-ish at this point and Bridge & Paul's eyes were looking a tad glazed, so we said our goodbyes to the wonderful people we met throughout the day and headed off to Kiama in search of dinner, which turned out to be the largest serve of fish and chips we'd ever seen - although we were starving none of us made much of a dent in that massive lot of food! It was lovely chatting to Mannie eating dinner on the harbour.
The hospitable Monty let us crash at his house for the night, and may I say that we all slept like the dead. Festivals, as brilliant as they are, just kill you at the end of a long day, particularly since we'd all slept roughly 4 hours the night before, so a nice comfy bed was wonderful to crash in!
And then the Big Drive Home was upon us before we knew it. A gruelling 12 hour drive from Kiama to Brisbane. Our intentions were to leave at 8am sharp, but we all *got up* at 8am, so that plan went to pot. After picking up supplies at the local Woolworths and taking hilarious video blogs, we finally hit the open road at 10am.
And we reached Brisbane at 5pm the following day! More on that trip soon . . .
