The two weeks after Ken left passed pretty uneventfully. I watered the gardens (hot & no rain meant no lawn mowing tho) and went to the Wednesday night Pretty Shaky Band jam sessions. I’m going to miss those people. I’d been plagued by hand problems the last year and couldn’t play my guitar as much as I had opportunity to, but I could always go and listen and play just a little bit. When I get settled out there, I’ll have to hunt up another group to play with. It might take some doing - there’s a lot of bluegrass in the Phoenix area, but Appalachian old-time is harder to find. Love that old time fiddle music.
The premier event of that music style occurs every August at Camp Washington Carver (near Fayetteville WV) – the Appalachian Stringband Music Festival (aka Clifftop): http://www.wvculture.org/stringband/. This is a gathering of nearly 3 thousand people who are there primarily to camp and play music. Yes, there are contests and nightly shows of the the contest finalists, but that’s not the real focus – it’s really about meeting old & new friends from across the country and playing music together. I had been attending Clifftop almost every year since 1998 – shortly after learning to play guitar and falling into this type of music.
Anyway… I typically would head down there the Friday or Saturday before the official start of the festival and just hang out with friends. Ken & Guy were returning from England Wednesday afternoon the 25th. Sooo, I decided to head down to Ohio on Wednesday and spend a few days in Springfield with Ken before continuing on down to West Virginia. (No, he wasn’t coming with me. We had a deal – I wouldn’t attend NASCAR races and he wouldn’t come to music festivals.)
I planned on meeting Ken & Guy at the airport. It was just for the emotional high since I didn’t have enough room in the car to drive them back to Springfield. There was plenty of time so I had a leisurely start mid-morning and was southbound on Waverly toodling along in the right lane when a major glitch in the plans happened. I was side-swiped. Just a mile into my trip. ARGHHHH! A woman in the left hand lane switched to the right lane but didn’t allow for the fact that I was there. I could see her in my mirror but couldn’t speed up to avoid the collision because there was another car right in front of me.
As you can see, not major damage, but I just didn’t need that. Not only was I leaving on a two and a half week trip, I was going to sell the car shortly before we planned to head back to Arizona and the time it would take to repair the car would eat into my advertising time. So back to the house to contact the insurance agency and find out what I was supposed to do next. It was early afternoon by the time all the statements and phone calls were made and I had the repair quote (and the assurance the car was OK to drive) and got on the road again. I left a message for Ken briefly saying what happened and that I would see him at Guy’s house around 6pm instead of at the airport. I must have still had a lot of adrenaline in my system then since he said I sounded real panicky. I *was* speaking pretty fast.
The rest of the trip was uneventful and I spent a couple of days in Springfield with Ken and Guy. Guy’s a lovely person and I can see why Ken likes him.
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