It turns out that the performance at the King Place Retirement home was for the grand re-opening of the place. They have recently done some new construction enlarging their facilities. They had a few speeches from local politicians including the mayor of Midland, who cut the ribbon. Joan, the lady who runs King Place use to run a home here in Muskoka, that’s how she knows about us. In the 5 years that we have been working together she has always wanted the whole orchestra to perform for her events, but be it weather or space limitations it has never worked out. She was so excited and pleased to have all of us. The weather was absolutely perfect! They were nice enough to give us a Men’s change room, a Ladies change room and a lounge room, plus feed us lunch. And for those of you out there who want to know what we ate (you know who you are) we had a scrumptious meal of spinach salad with roasted pecans and strawberries, pasta salad, a garbanzo bean salad, vegetable wraps with hummus, cake and drinks. I have to say my favorite was the spinach salad. The most common request I get is for more pictures so here you go.

Last night was the Huntsville Town Docks Performance. It was a small group, something like 35 players. I wasn’t actually playing I just went to watch. You would think that we would get sick of pan but a lot of us like to go and watch when we aren’t performing especially when it’s so close. There were a lot of familiar faces in the crowd and a bunch of new ones. It’s getting to the end of the summer season for Muskoka Cottagers so they are all soaking up the last vestiges of summer events. This performance was the conclusion to the Huntsville Art in the Parks. Every Wednesday night in the summer they put on some kind of music at the park. It’s really kind of a nice relaxing evening.

Well as I said in my last post it was suppose to rain when we were going to perform at Sprucedale and rain it did, but the show went on and we didn’t get a drop of water on us. That fact is thanks to the awesome new structure that they have built. It’s kind of hard to describe what it’s like. It’s a HUGE covering (no walls) for a hockey rink with a building at one end. It was great. We could drive the truck right under the covering so even unloading and loading was a breeze. There wasn’t a ton of people, but there was still quite a few people considering the weather and the fact that Sprucedale is not the most logical place for people to expect a Steel Band to be performing. That’s the really cool thing I have learned from performing at a whole bunch of different kinds of venues and locations. You can have just as much fun at a small town event as you can at a huge thing in Toronto, maybe even more. Some of the best fireworks we have seen have been at the smaller venues.

So we made our return to Baysville last Sunday and so did the rain. Surprisingly even with it raining there was a crowd. People came prepared with their umbrellas or they just got wet. I will have to admit it was one of the stickiest performances ever. When it wasn’t raining the air was thick enough to slice which means that you felt like it was still raining because you were drenched. There was lot of return faces that we have seen in past years. I heard that last year when we didn’t perform some individual went to the organizers of the show and offered to pay for us to come this year and this year a different person volunteered to hire us for next year. I don’t know if all that is true, but it’s pretty cool to think that the audience likes us enough to dig into there pockets and make it happen. Well tomorrow is the Sprucedale performance pretty neat because it only takes 5 minutes to get there, you could walk if you wanted too. Bad news though the weather calls for something like 70-90% rain, so we’ll see how it goes.

Ok so if your not from Muskoka you may not know what The Rosseau is. The Rosseau is a luxury J.W. Marriot Resort and Spa on Lake Rosseau, Ontario. We were there on Friday to play for Hospice Muskoka’ s Annual “Summer Sizzler” Charity event. We got the chance to play on the Lakeview Lawn for cocktail hour. Let me just say WHAT A VIEW!!! the main building sits on a rise on the edge of the lake. So you have this awesome view of  the lake with all it’s islands and inlets. There were quite a few functions going on there this weekend, a couple of weddings and some cooperate events. It’s actually our first time there, we have been to Grandview and Deerhurst Resorts often enough, but it sure was nice to have a change of scenery. Besides the staff was really nice and polite even though we were not guests. The weather was gorgeous the only complaint would be how hot it was. It was killer!  But I guess the weather was perfect for being outside just not for setting up and they were kind enough to make sure we had showers available for us after we were done setting up. So it was cocktail hour we which means a bunch of people schmoozing and sipping drinks a few where dancing. I forgot to charge my camera battery so the only pictures I got were with my phone but it might give you an idea. Who knows I might just have to make my way back there as a guest! I wish…I’ll ask around and see if anyone has better pics.