We've spent the last two months on three different continents and been home exactly one week. Right after the New Year, Haley and I took off for Boston where she had her first gig of the year with Joey Abarta and Keith Murphy. From Boston we drove to New York to fly to Thailand where we visited the Mercy Centre again.
It was so nice to see the children now a year and a half later. Haley enjoyed hanging out with them, watching their music and dance lessons, and giving some lessons to the children attending the kindergarten. We met the Little Birds, young people who have grown too old for the Mercy Centre but are HIV positive and need the support they can provide each other. Haley, along with musicians Mick Moloney, Donie Carroll, and Brenda Castles also performed in a session nine nights of our two week stay in a session at Scruffy Murphy's Pub. Bangkok is an interesting city and we had many adventures.
After our Thailand trip, we fly home for a week then flew back to New York and off to Ireland for another two weeks. Haley was selected to compete in the Sean O'Riada Gold Medal competition. She did not win the competition but enjoyed the event immensely. The event organizers really encouraged the fiddlers competing to get to know one another and made it a community building event. The other fiddlers were each amazing in their own way and it was a treat to hear them all perform.
After the competition, we traveled around the country visiting different cities and Haley participated in Irish sessions with various musicians nearly every night...one night she and our host in Ennis, Bob, participated in four sessions (almost 8 hours of music)! She has decided she needs to spend more time in Ireland absorbing the music and the culture and this has helped her make some decisions about her future...at least the next few years.We really enjoyed visiting Connemara for the first time and Haley was honored to be invited to record for a very exciting project that will be released in the United States this coming winter...sorry to be so mysterious but don't want to spoil the surprise. We definitely would love to return to Connemara and explore it when the weather is a bit warmer.
We flew back to NY from Ireland and, due to an impending storm, headed straight for Montreal where we got snowed in for a day then picked up Haley's musician friend, Quinn, and drove north a bit to a recording study where the two of them are working on a new album.
Some exciting stuff happening for my girl!
