CK and I agreed that we wouldn’t travel much this summer. Maybe a conference, visit some family, but no 25-state road trip and no taking 300 high schoolers to Europe.
That idea was short lived, because here’s what we ended up doing:
I’m going to paste a bunch of pictures, since I couldn’t do that before but now with WordPress I CAN!
The summer travel extravaganza started with CK judging the Musical Merit Competition in San Diego, while I drove to Missouri to visit my parents. CK joined a few days later, and we did our usual visit to Elephant Rocks and Johnsons Shut-ins. I broke down and finally bought an iPhone. And then it was back to Fargo.
Where we almost instantly put an offer on a house.
We’d been wanting to not live in an apartment since the moment we moved into our apartment, and we’d been surfing Zillow for months, and we’d spent a few weeks looking, and the night we got back from Missouri–after a day of driving from Omaha to Fargo, we unloaded our bags and went and looked at three houses, putting an offer on one. The offer was accepted, and then we…left town again.
Trip number 3 was CK going to Madison for the MACRO theory conference. Trip number 4 was me flying down to Oklahoma to work with Jonathan Nichol and Marvin Lamb to record Marvin’s expanded Tenor Saxophone quintet, Woodcuts (previously: HERD!). Three incredibly busy days spent in OU’s recording studio before flying back to Fargo.
Here’s Marvin’s Woodcuts and Bartleby:
Shortly thereafter we headed west to Montana to visit CK’s family. Since our travels were far from over, we took Bartleby to stay with the Keoghs for the summer. Bartleby wasn’t thrilled with the car ride.
But I got my annual picture of Woodbine Creek
And Woodbine Falls
And, you know, nature stuff.
And then it was back to Fargo.
The sixth trip was the big one. The International Clarinet Association’s CLARINETFEST® was held in Oostende, Belgium this year. Last summer, CK asked if I’d be interested in writing a clarinet-saxophone-piano trio for NDSU’s Boreas Ensemble, to be premiered in Belgium. I said yes, knowing that if it got accepted I’d get to write a fun piece, and if it didn’t, I’d get credit for being agreeable. Well, it was accepted, the piece got written, and on the fourth of July we landed in Brussels.
We stayed the night in Brussels
We saw some churches
And some larger churches
And some pretty intense stained glass.
We saw some art
We saw the Manneken Pis
We saw…what is that thing?
And then it was off to Clarinetfest! Where we were greeted by the embodiment of the clarinetfest logo!
And of course we had to take a selfie
Oostende was nice, as a coastal Belgian vacation town, but not what you’d think of as stereotypical Europe.
And then it was back to Brussels, and then an express train ride to Amsterdam for a short trip. There was the Rijksmuseum, which we saw a tiny part of
And across the road, the Royal Concertgebouw!
And also more art:
There’s something wrong with the clock at the Amsterdam Train Station
And then, back to Fargo again on Friday. But on Wednesday, we left again, CK to southern Minnesota, and me to New York for the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, or NYCEMF.
Andrew Allen at MSU Texas performed the New York premiere of Austerity for Soprano Saxophone and tape.
It’s a very long piece. Horizontally.
So after all of that, we ended up back in Fargo, closed on the house, moved in, and stayed put for a while.
Until the next week when we had to go get Bartleby from Montana. Where he was enjoying nature.
After all that travel, we were all exhausted.
There’s more to report, but at some point summer stopped happening and the school year began, but that’s for later.
