Just a short post to catch ya’ll up. 

We headed out from Bull Run on our 3 hour trip to Philadelphia for the Saint Saëns concert about 1100 on Saturday morning…having routed ourselves around the really, really boring drive up 95 (and coincidentally around the 8 bucks worth of tolls we would have paid on that route)…anyway, we arrived at the Comfort Inn near the airport about 1500. After a quick nap, shower, and getting dressed we headed off for dinner. Our original destination was a Ted’s around the corner from the concert hall but it turned out to be closed so after parking in the garage across the street from the Kimmel Center we headed to a nearby Fado’s Irish Pub instead. Fado’s is a chain but it’s sort of upscale. We had 2 beers each…started with a Guinness and a Smithwicks and then had a Newcastle Brown Ale each. Along with that we had some Jalapeño Cream Cheese Puffs and then some mini burgers…topping it off with a great brownie with ice cream, chocolate and caramel sauce and whipped cream. After that we headed across to the concert hall for the concert.

The first half of the concert was the Prokofiev Violin Concerto #2 and the Casella Symphonic Fragments from La donna serpente…neither of which did a thing for us. They were well played but didn’t turn us on much. The faster parts of the Casella were pretty decent but the slower movements didn’t seem to really go anywhere…and the Prolofiev didn’t have much of a melody to follow, it just seemed like disjointed playing. After intermission we had the Saint Saëns and it was pretty wonderful. After the lack of upper register in Charleston a week back this organ was truly well voiced…and both the soloist and the conductor believed in giving the organ the leading role in the symphony (it is named Organ after all)…so they really let it rip. The conductor kept the tempo in the finale down a bit slower and more majestic (we prefer it that way) and I’m pretty sure that (as Scotty used to say)…he gave it all she’s got at the end. Truly magnificent performance.

Here’s a nice shot of the organ pipes. The soloist sits right below the large set of pipes you can see and there are another two smaller sets to his right and left behind the seats you can see under the pipes. Pretty impressive organ loft we said…and played to perfection as well.

After the concert we headed home but got stuck up in the aftermath of both a Phillies game and the Frozen Four NCAA Hockey Championship…Connie got pretty aggravated by the traffic but we kept at it and eventually got through the backup and to the hotel where we went to sleep pretty quickly.

Sunday morning we got up, hit a church right close to the hotel for Mass then headed home, arriving about 1300 after a couple of errand stops on the way.

Monday we got up, packed and hitched and hit the road about 1100 for the 130 mile trip down to Midlothian to see their human kids…we’re parked in site 103 at Pocahontas State Park Campground. We had to stop by the dump station on the way in for about an hour and flush our tanks several times trying to get whatever was stuck to the side and screwing up our level indicators loose…we think we accomplished that. One thing we forgot was the Pocahontas has no sewer connections at the sites…so we’ll be walking 100 yards to the bathhouse to take showers. We left BAT hitched up just in case we end up having to go and dump partway through our stay…Connie’s sort of bummed about that. Next time we come here we’ll have to see if we can find a full hookup campground instead. Here’s a shot of our site this morning…taken in the rain.

Today we headed over to Bryan and Jenn’s…she’s off on spring break with her mom and he’s at work but we’re doing laundry and Connie is working while we wait. They’re coming over for dinner tomorrow and we’ll have a nice meal with them.

That’s about it…hopefully we’ll figure out some fun stuff to do at least a couple of days while we are here…Connie has more work to do and Neil needs to do a drop off and pick up from the storage location near here as well.

Cyas.