(Mis)adventures

Every trip of this magnitude is bound to have a few things that don't go as planned, and ours has been no exception. Here are a few of the mishaps that we have weathered:

One of our altos traveled to England about a week ahead of the rest of us, to spend some time visiting a friend. Unfortunately on the first day she was here, she fell and broke her wrist. When she joined the rest of the choir in Bath, she was sporting a red and white cast on her right arm -- colours carefully chosen to match her choir gown, of course! This past Tuesday she spent quite a bit of time in a hospital in Gloucester, getting surgery on her wrist. She is recovering well and was able to return to the choir for today's Evensong service. One member of our support team spent the day in the hospital to keep tabs on how things were going, and many have been helping out with the tasks that are difficult to perform with one hand in a cast!

One of our sopranos was planning to join us in Gloucester, but we received word late last week that her grandmother is seriously ill so she needed to return to Edmonton. We're missing her wonderful voice, and our thoughts and prayers and with her and her family.

One of our basses finally got his luggage today -- two weeks after he flew from Calgary to London! Apparently it came on a later flight than he did, and by the time it was first delivered to our hotel in Bath, we had already moved on. Then the courier service lost track of it ... or something like that. Our tour guide was very persistent in finally tracking down his bag and getting it delivered to the right place.

On Thursday morning our coach driver discovered that someone had vandalized the coach overnight, damaging the windshield wipers. The damage was extensive enough that a new part would be needed. We were due for our morning rehearsal near the Cathedral (several miles from the hotel), so we all trooped down the hill to the nearest bus stop and caught a city bus into town. It's a good thing it was a double-decker bus; otherwise we would not have all fit onto one bus. I'm sure that the locals wondered why 28 noisy people with funny accents were causing a long wait while they boarded the bus at one stop, and disturbing their normally quiet ride into town! Here we are at the bus stop:


There was some further trouble getting the correct part, but our coach driver tells us that we now have a new coach, so the Gloucester city buses should be a bit quieter tomorrow!

Laura S.