Wellington Folk Festival 08

What a boring tittle for four wonderful days filled with great music and great friends. If music was like chocolate then this festival was like eating bars and bars of deep, rich, dark 70+% chocolate. Not that weak watered down milk chocolate but the real good stuff. MMMMMMM!

We got to the Brookfields Outdoor Education Centre on Friday morning and set up our campsite first of all. Jenny and I are part of the site management team for the festival so we get to arrive before most people and that gives us the advantage of being able to put our tent in one of the "good" spots.

Good for us means that we're away from the campfires and other sources of smoke. There's something about humans when they go "camping" (complete with the queen size inner sprung mattress and a small lounge suit) that seems to bring out the need to become a Davy Crockett and have a campfire with smokey wet wood. Over the years we've worked out where we can escape all that smoke and this is something that is very important for Jenny. For that reason we cook outside our tent in our outdoor kitchen. The little tent you can see in the background on the left is where we keep our gas powered fridge.

These photos were taken before it started raining. And it rained, and rained, and rained and then it rained some more. In fact a lot of the campsite, particularly in the busy spots was resembling melted chocolate by Sunday afternoon. Did we, or anybody really care??? Nope! The music made the wet irrelevant.

We had the great pleasure of listening to Pat Higgins, formerly of County Galway and now living in Wellington, when he sang some wonderfully soulful songs as well as playing some fantastic tunes on his Irish flute.

For us the highlight of the festival was Tim van Eyken who was over from England. He is a superb musician and plays the melodeon with consumate skill. Coupled with that he has a beautiful singing voice and is very handy with a guitar too. If you ever hear of him playing in a town near you do what you can to go listen to him. It will be worth your while.

In the tradition of folk music concerts the final concert was closed off with what we call an "ugly". This is when most, if not all, of the musicians who were feature guests at the festival play together on the stage. And what a rousing time it was too! With Jugularity (an Australian band) leading the song it was like going on a rollercoaster ride around Piccadilly Circus. What a joy!

And then, all too soon, it was all over for another year. On packing up day the sun shone on us all so we were lucky enough to be able to pack away dry tents which saved us another big job when we got home.

Now we have the warm, chocolatety memories to savor of another wonderful Wellington festival.