Colorado

Hello again!

Dad and I arrived in Florida a couple days ago having enjoyed a wonderful couple of days in Colorado. We did a few workshops and a performance in Durango and visited Mesa Verde to see the old Pueblo ruins and views of the Rocky Mountains.

Our amazing host Maria from Durango picked us up in New Mexico and drove us up to Colorado. At the Colorado Border we could see the brown, sage brush covered hills of New Mexico give way to the craggy snow covered mountains of Colorado:

Arriving in Durango we just had an hour or two before I led a step dance workshop and then dad and I each led music workshops. There's a great group of people in the Colorado/New Mexico border area who are interested in Scottish/Cape Breton culture and the workshops were a lot of fun!

The next morning we went out to Mesa Verde, a national park and site of pre-Pueblo Native American settlements, some of which have survived until today due to being nestled in cliff faces and hollows in the rock. The mesa itself was incredibly high up and took a long, climbing, winding drive to get there. We stopped for pictures of the incredible vistas this drive offered a few times. Here's a picture of dad taking a picture:

 At the top we got a tour from a ranger of the one area that was open in the winter season, a group of buildings called "Spruce House." The picture below is from the ridge above it before we descended into the hollow to get a closer look:

On returning that afternoon to Durango we explored the downtown area and played a concert for a great audience of interested people. All in all a great couple days! Thanks for reading and keep an eye out for the next entry: Florida!  

--Neil

P.S. I will be posting complete photo albums on facebook so find me on there if you want to see more pictures!

New Mexico

Hello dear blog-readers,
Apologies for my tardiness in updating this, I will try to be more regular after this. Dad and I just finished the better part of a week in New Mexico and it was a very busy few days with a whole bunch of gigs and GORGEOUS views, so this will be a bit of a long post. I bought my own digital camera on the first day out here and got a bit trigger-happy with it so I'm going to upload the whole photo album when I can for all your viewing pleasure and I'll post the link to that on here. For now, though, you'll get a few of the best or most representative photos from the trip. [UPDATE: I have put half the New Mexico photos up on facebook now, tried to make it public but not sure it worked. If you're my friend though you should be able to see them]

We started our tour by flying into Albuquerque, spending the night in Cerrillos with my aunt and uncle and then heading straight up to northern New Mexico to meet my former classmate Hannah, who had helped us set up an afternoon show at a beautiful adobe church with an amazing Steinway piano in Taos and a house concert that night at her place in Dixon, a historic adobe home that is owned by a Columbia University professor.

Church in Taos, NM

House Concert in Dixon, NM

The next morning, before we headed back down to Cerrillos, Hannah showed us around the Rio Grande gorge, where she's doing anthropological work on the petroglyphs and such, and also took us to the bridge that spans the gorge something like 600 feet in the air... Terrifying...

Dad and me in the Gorge

View of the Gorge from the center of the bridge.... Pictures can't really do the sheer height of it justice....

Back in the Santa Fe area we did a marathon of gigs, performing at an old Wild-West style saloon in Lamy, a great BBQ place in Santa Fe itself and an old roadhouse called the Mineshaft Tavern in Madrid, all over the course of a day and a half--10 hours of playing in a little over 24 hours! We stayed in bunk beds in a little one-room shack outside my aunt and uncle's place, heated partially by a wood stove and partially by a space heater. Finally we rounded out the weekend with a much needed day of rest and a bluegrass pickin' party! 

The view just outside our little shack

Pickin in the kitchen!

There were far too many great pictures from this part of the tour for me to put even a fraction of them up here so keep an eye out and I'll post a link to a full picture album hopefully in the next couple days [NOTE: see above update]. Until then, here's to good times and great music! Next stop, Durango, Colorado!

Cheers,

--Neil

Swans Island

I am writing this update from the Bolt Bus between New York and Boston. I played a contradance last night in NYC and will be in Boston this weekend getting ready for the BCMFest Celtic Music Monday show that I'm organizing this coming Monday. But this post is actually about the 10 days I just spent on BEAUTIFUL Swans Island where my lovely girlfriend Kate is currently working.

Swans is a fairly remote island by most people's standards, requiring a 40 min ferry ride that leaves from the more well known Mount Desert Island (the island with Bar Harbor on it). Luckily Mount Desert Island is connected to the mainland by a causeway so there isn't a double ferry ride involved at least... Swans has about 300 year-round residents and another 300 summer residents. The year round population is predominantly fishing and lobstering families and Kate is working for their historical society doing things like conducting oral history interviews and organizing community events. This meant that as part of my trip I played for a community dance Kate had organized.

The dance was a great success and it was wonderful to see a folk dance taking place in a rural community where everyone knew each other beforehand instead of meeting at the event. It felt more true to the old folk dance traditions than most contradances and country dances we have these days. The band was myself on piano and the great Irish fiddler Alden Robinson (from Portland, ME based band The Press Gang) and the dance was called by my mother, Laura Pearlman. In addition, my dad jumped up at the end of the dance to play some fiddle with us and there was also a featured performance by a community band organized and led by Kate.

The rest of my trip was a chance to relax and explore the island before my touring schedule really takes off on Wednesday when I'm headed to New Mexico to start a 3 week tour with my dad with a bunch of really exciting new music we've just come up with for our duo. I got to take a number of beautiful walks around Swans and eating awesome food including Swans Island seafood--the last night on the island we gathered mussels ourselves from a rocky beach nearby!  I don't currently have most of the photos from this recent trip but here is a picture Kate took when I was on the island last October:

And on the food note, here are the mussels we gathered and steamed!

Covered in barnacles and such (the rock at the bottom we used to scrape em clean)

Cleaned and ready to steam

Ready to eat!!

Cheers for now,
--Neil