Ely, MN

So that's it.... the last of our US tour, and farewell to Chris O'Gorman... and thanks.
He has been excellent; lovely to have him on board for these last few weeks... We are all grateful (and Steve, I suspect, especially...)

Our mid-west experience came to an end in Ely (Just down the road from Babbitt & Embarrass (really!))...
...a lovely town, with yet another excellent theatre with wonderful staff (well, Peter worked damn hard, anyhow!) ...

Plane home tomorrow after lunch; just got to get the tuxedos back to Walmart... (this line went very well throughout the tour!)
...a few days off before a rare appearance in Cornwall at the Fowey du Maurier Festival - wonderful...

Wahpeton, ND

What, no EP?
Town Heap ?
When at op.?

(that's enough anags. ed.)

Just across the border from Breckenridge, MN we find Wahpeton, ND; and anagram-fanatics paradise...

Another lovely community, and excellent technical team at the theatre; no surprises that all has gone wonderfully...

We have left On the paw & are now many miles away in Ely, MN...
On the way here we found a splendid café in Park Rapids... Bella Caffe... excellent oasis of culture.

Now for that steak...

triumphant return to... New Ulm, MN

Just 18 years later, we were back at New Ulm, MN (Old Ulm being the German birthplace of Albert Einstein)...
Last time there was a quite significant German-speaking population - they seem to have 'moved on', but there is a lot of Germanic stuff about the place... especially architecturally; here's the Hermann Monument... (it was indeed a sunny, if cold, day today...)



This would not be out of place in any German town or city! Wagner would have loved it...

Lovely audience and theatre...
We had school kids doing all the technical stuff tonight, and they were as good as any theatre people we have met on our travels this tour - excellent.

In the afternoon, our espresso luck ran out, as the wifi/espresso place closed the minute we walked into it at 3pm! Luckily a bookshop stepped into the breach, at least on the espresso front.

Through the magic of download, we listened to I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue in the car on the way to our next hotel (a hotel we stayed in right at the beginning of this US sojourn in the middle of October)...

In our near-the-end is our beginning to miscoin a phrase...

Easy Cheese

Now surely it is clear that we have no need for any fake cheese - we are brimming over with the stuff!

Despite being offered this in Worthington, MN (where we were looked after royally), we had a splendid evening... having had an excellent afternoon sampling the delights of Ben Lees Coffeebar. It was very, very cold here...tho' the audience were equivalently warm...

Many miles later, we are here in (much more sunny) Fond du Lac, WI...

(See previous blog for much more edifying picture of Steve & Martene's new life...)

Roseau, MN then Europe

A 'final' concert at Roseau, MN, (that's Rose-oh, btw) before we hop over to Europe (Wunsiedel, Germany) for a quick a cappella nacht with Peter Martin Jacob and Magenta...

We had a splendid Guy Fawkes night in Roseau (Ian, in the audience, from Maidenhead told us we had not mentioned this anniversary! - he was right...); great evening again, there will be more next week... after we have had a quick German sojourn...

We still have Chris with us; no news yet of latest Cantabile new generation...

Aeroports, planes... marvellous...

Thief River Falls, MN

Another town, another espresso house...
You might think it dull that we attach such weight to the availability of espresso; it must stem from our first US tours in the 1990s, when it was almost impossible to find a place where espresso occurred at all, apart from when we approached Seattle (where I for one, rather OD'd on the stuff...) However, Wired Bean, just across from our hotel, the mellifluously-named, C'mon Inn (geddit?) is tremendous.... and even has sandwiches in which the meat part of the sandwich is more than half-a-milimetre thick and tastes of something.... such glory...

...and the concert? After nine hours in the car yesterday, it was excellent... the good people of TRF bought CDs and had a good time in a packed Sunday afternoon theatre. Huge crowd, huge fun...
Splendid technical skill too in the theatre...

One more before we pop home for a quickie in Germany, in Roseau, MN... just up the road... time for a lie-in...

Hettinger, ND

Another delightful community at Hettinger, ND; very friendly people, who fed us wonderfully, and looked after us with great care.
We were singing in a church, and that was splendid... good acoustics of course, and many children there with their parents - a real family evening... terrific.
All were dead impressed by Richard's forceful and loud nose blow in Creole Love Call...

No sooner had we arrived than we were off for a nine-hour jaunt to Thief River Falls, MN, where I type...

We managed to stop for a second time at Rabb's coffee house in Jamestown; the girl was not that impressed to see us a second time (excellent espresso & grub) - she did not know that we had travelled over 4000 miles and so the chances of our happening on her café twice were quite small!

Looking forward to tomorrow pm in Thief River Falls - after an extra hour's sleep (daylight saving ends a week after UK's change...)

Fergus Falls, MN

Splendid driving form Chris and Mike brought us the nearly 600 miles back to Minnesota... and a wee bit tired were delighted to find the hotel had its own restaurant & that it was open... Glory.
The slight bad news were that the band were due on in an hour.  Now the band were fine, but the tables to eat on, were situated right next to the stage... and these guys have clearly decided that silence is for wimps and play impressively loudly... continuing their endurance battles from all day, Chris and Mike saw the band through their first set... (Richard and I retired!).

Having driven so far, we had a whole day here at Fergus Falls, which was excellent. The young girl at reception clearly decided I needed exercise and told me it only took 20 minutes to walk into town... no worries:- 45 minutes after setting off I was having my (well-earned) double espresso and European-style sandwich... all splendid.  Less splendid was the I'm-sorry-we-will-be-closed-on-the-26th-and-the-27th-October sign on the wonderfully-packed bookshop... best in the area, it crowed, but shut it remained... ah well... The hour and a half walk was worth it for Café 116 - terrific...

On to the gig itself, a great hall, with great staff, and lovely people who looked after us well... and bought CDs too... hoorah.  One woman waxed lyrical about The Four Freshmen - we apologised for not having room for every group in a two-hour concert... and told of the songs of theirs that we could have done... I think she was happy!

We all enjoyed Fergus Falls - especially Mike whose birthday it is today - he was presented with a bottle at the end of the concert and everyone sang him a happy birthday...

On to Redfield, South Dakota for an afternoon concert....

Blue Earth, MN

Concert no.2 passed off as easily as no.1:- another packed house enjoyed the music of vocal groups past and present. The lighting guy was extraordinarily splendid and well prepared...
...and I must tell you that on this tour we are unveiling our new book of arrangements, as published by our agents, Edition Peters: The Great British a cappella Songbook - I shall surely mention this once more. (We are dead proud of it, after all...)
In this US show we sing Danny Boy and Oranges and Lemons from the book...

We have already sold a few on this tour - hooray.
It is available right now via Edition Peters' website.

Contents of it are:

Pastime with Good Company - Henry VIII
Greensleeves - trad. English
Oranges and Lemons - trad. English
Myfanwy - Mynyddog / Parry
A Man's a Man for A' That - Burns / trad. Scots
O Danny Boy - Weatherley / trad. Irish
Pomp and Circumstance - Forsythe / Elgar
A Foggy Day (in London Town) - Gershwins
Hush Macushla - Cantabile - The London Quartet   all arranged for SATB... go on, you know you want to!

We're off to Watertown WI in the am, tho' we might just have to sample the delights of the Austin Spam Museum... well, you would, wouldn't you?!

Ortonville MN

...and here we are in the USA.
First gig has been and gone, and very well it went too.
We have a guest singer too!
Steve is on pre-paternity leave, as his wife will give birth during this tour, (much good luck to them), and so we are joined by young tenor Chris O'Gorman.

His first concert was a great success & he did a fine job; as often on these tours, we were singing in a school, but an excellent place to sing it was (again, as often, the stage doubled as a basketball court!) - splendid acoustic.
Coupled with a tremendous crowd of people from far and wide to hear us celebrate vocal groups from across the decades, and across the world...
One down, eighteen to go... it's off to Blue Earth MN now...
more US adventures to come...