We'd been overextended for the past few Pennsics, trudging up the hill every day with a wagon full of musical instruments and sheet music, rehearsing for one gig or another, etc. So this year we reduced the number of commitments to other people (only one Commedia show, only one dance ball, teaching only one class), and rehearsed for those commitments hardly at all (and sounded no worse than usual).
Partly counteracting the above, Trio Tramontana (shalmestere, me, and our friend Deonna) had scheduled a half-hour time slot for a concert at the Performing Arts Tent entitled "Medieval Smoky Jazz". shalmestere had picked out a program months in advance, and the three of us got together a couple of times at one house or another earlier in the summer for a full day of rehearsal, so things were sounding pretty good. At Pennsic, we had a few more rehearsals, but they were in the camp next door to ours, where there are trees and shade, rather than a mile up the hill where there are neither. The concert went OK: the shawm tracks on the recording sound terrible, for both recording-technology and musical reasons, but several of the vocal and soft-instrument tracks sound pretty good even to us.
And we spent a bunch of time sitting in camp chatting with neighbors or sleeping. We actually had two sit-down, cooked, plausibly medieval dinners in camp with the rest of Enchanted Ground, all sitting on a mix of Glastonbury chairs, wooden benches, and tripod stools around a trestle table with a linen tablecloth and appropriate tableware. And since we had no evening gigs after dinner, we were able to help wash dishes. I attended two or three of Cariadoc's legendary bardic circles: one was excellent, with several superb storytellers (and one or two not-so-good), and the other nights nobody showed up so we went to bed early.
+1 to staying in a hotel on the way to and from Pennsic, even though our drive is a few hours shorter than yours. (At least time actually moving: despite leaving home on Thursday morning, we had traffic and it took us over four hours to drive the 90 miles to the Pennsylvania border.) It means you can start setting up while reasonably fresh, awake, showered, and before the hottest part of the day, and you don't have to push your hours-of-driving-safely limits.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-20 12:03 pm (UTC)Partly counteracting the above, Trio Tramontana (
And we spent a bunch of time sitting in camp chatting with neighbors or sleeping. We actually had two sit-down, cooked, plausibly medieval dinners in camp with the rest of Enchanted Ground, all sitting on a mix of Glastonbury chairs, wooden benches, and tripod stools around a trestle table with a linen tablecloth and appropriate tableware. And since we had no evening gigs after dinner, we were able to help wash dishes. I attended two or three of Cariadoc's legendary bardic circles: one was excellent, with several superb storytellers (and one or two not-so-good), and the other nights nobody showed up so we went to bed early.
+1 to staying in a hotel on the way to and from Pennsic, even though our drive is a few hours shorter than yours. (At least time actually moving: despite leaving home on Thursday morning, we had traffic and it took us over four hours to drive the 90 miles to the Pennsylvania border.) It means you can start setting up while reasonably fresh, awake, showered, and before the hottest part of the day, and you don't have to push your hours-of-driving-safely limits.
Relatively low-stress Pennsic FTW.