April Tour: Day 5

Sat April 14, 2012

Another early morning for us, as we headed from East Lansing, MI to London, Ontario. Not too far away, but it's better to be safe than sorry when dealing with border crossings! We had an early sound check, and a bunch of friends in and around London that we hope to see, so it'll be a great day. When we reached the Canadian border, it was quite a breeze, but the funny part was when Cillian was asked how long he'd been a resident of Canada. We all looked a bit confused and wondered if it was a trick question, but Cillian answered that he'd never lived in Canada and has been (and still is) living in Ireland. It ended up that one of his previous trips to Canada a border agent must have accidentally put the wrong stamp in his passport! A bit of a funny moment to pass the long time in the car! It was nice to be back in Canada again...if only very briefly!

We finally reached London, and checked into the hotel. We were quite excited that we were staying at the Hilton and the Harlem Globetrotters had just been there the night before, so everyone was pretty excited about that! As we only had about an hour and a half before sound check, we all went our separate ways and some of us grabbed lunch, or did some errands/admin. We then met up and drove to the gig at the Aeolian Performing Arts Center. What a cool venue! We did our sound check and what an awesome sound guy as well! We were very much looking forward to playing the gig that evening. We realized that we had a bit of time and everything was quite close, so we went back to the hotel and got to chill out for a bit (or teach a skype lesson! I love my students too much! :) and Cillian went for a swim in the nice pool.

We then were taken out for dinner by 2 hosts from Sun Fest (the presenters for our show) to this super cool restaurant. Since it happened to be the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking, many people were talking about it on the radio, as well as reenactments all over the world. The restaurant just so happened to be doing a Titanic themed night. The whole place was decorated like a ship, all the staff were in costumes and the waiters were all dressed as sailors and the owner was dressed as the captain. He even came to our table and told a bunch of interesting facts about the Titanic! and the soundtrack to the movie was playing the whole dinner. My Heart Will Go On was heard so many different times, in all different arrangements (yes, we are all musicians and notice things like this!)...until we noticed that and a few minutes later the music switched to Evita. We were wondering what that was about...until a lady dressed in the most beautiful costume walked down the stairs and started singing! She even came to our table and serenaded us. We didn't want to leave the restaurant! We thought this was way more fun than out show could be! hahaha As we were leaving the restaurant, more people were coming in for the first dinner seating of the Titanic dinner...all dressed in costume! It was SO COOL! We even saw this older couple dressed in period costume & tux and it reminded us of the couple at the end of the movie that stayed in the bed together as the ship was sinking. Oh man! That was the most epic dinner I've ever experienced!

We headed straight to the venue and got ready for the gig...only to arrive to 2 home made pies by friends of the band! Amazing. It was quite a lovely show. We even included our 2 songs about drowning...unintentionally...but then got to tell our story about our Titanic dinner! :-) The audience was awesome and we all had a great time. After such a long and eventful day though, we were quite tired by the end of it and SO happy to see our amazingly comfortable beds...although bittersweet because of our early wake up! All in all, an awesome and epic day in Canada! Oh, Canada :-)