Wellington Folk Festival 2009

Another wonderful festival this year with great music, great guests and great friends. Every year it seems that the Wellington festival gets better. This year there was even someone who sang a song in Dutch. It was just lovely catching up with friends we hadn't seen since last year. I'm already looking forward to the 2010 festival.

We had decided to take the elwinfarm organics shop to the festival and Jenny had bought in a whole lot of special supplies that we expected would be in demand at the festival. In the weeks leading up to the festival I was busy making wood turnings to sell at the festival, among them my enlarged version of the seedling pot makers, of which I sold a good number. Another good item were the spurtles. I had planned to have a couple of new instruments ready for sale at the festival but farm work had to come before finishing them so I only had the dulcimer there I had finished some time before.

A few days before the festival our Nissan 4WD, which we use to tow our trailer, blew the gearbox so we were rather stuck and were looking seriously at having to cancel going to the festival. Thankfully we have some very good, and very generous, friends who let us use their Toyota Hilux over the weekend. What a life saver that was!! A huge vote of thanks to Fred and Shirley. Of course now I'm looking at having to spend the next two weeks under the car to fix it because I'm not about to spend over $2000 to pay someone to fix it for me. The joys of owning an older vehicle with nearly 300.000 km on the clock! At least up to this point we haven't had any major problems with it and, hopefully, once I've fixed the gearbox we won't have any other problems.