The Great Jonsson-Good US Tour Week I

2006-10-04

Dear Friends,

One of the very great pleasures for me on a big and important tour (or small and important!) is to record our adventures and know that I have friends who will read them. I have chosen a couple of friends, even asked permission of a couple, and am including those people who are our tour hosts to be on this list of recipients. I will totally understand if you wish to have your name off this list. (Just drop me a note with "Moved away - signed my server" or "Can't take your chatty, touristy, religious, biased, Canadian drool" in the subject header and I will gladly take you off)

Here is Week 1 of our 15-week journey. If you were the host and you spot something inaccurate, drop me a line so I can fix it. It happens, as the folks in Australia know..!

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Thursday Sept 7, We begin:
How do you begin a journey you have been planning for a whole year? After weeks of relentless focus on our trip, our van's renovation, the list of what to bring, checking in and again with concert hosts and 2 full weeks of packing, I truly could not believe we were leaving. To add to the surreal quality of the day, Summerland has been shrouded in smoke from regional fires and so we followed a corridor of smoke from the Okanagan cliffs into the mountains where another fire was barking at the gates of Manning Park. Our lunch stop in Princeton added a hazy pink-orange backdrop to the unreality; I was thoroughly exhausted from the tour before we had ever begun. So, Patrick and Nicole stared at me in disbelief as I emerged from our camper with my bathing suit on and made a run for the water-sprayer part of the park. After the intense heat of the day, what a relief it was! I was able to make my way in to Vancouver more grounded than before, for an overnight visit with friends, Bonnie and Ruth and others, before we leave tomorrow on what feels like the real first day of the trip.

Friday Sept 8. Freeland, Whidbey Island, WA:
The concert tour of a hundred days begins with the first concert, say the ancients. I shall spare you the details of our crossing the border and getting re-directed to the "commercial" customs exit/entry, caught by a wrong turn in the never-neverland of the parking lot you may not leave between the borders, the contemptuous treatment by the Canadian border officials and the perfectly courteous treatment by the Americans. I will tell you, though, that as I kneeled down in the customs building to reassure Isaac about the availability of toilets - which are now not for the public (!) - I found a two dollar coin on the floor. Now - I am not superstitious, just highly spiritual - and so I take this as a welcome sign of impending wealth. Or an encouragement to go ahead and find a toilet.

Our first event was with the Lutherans at Trinity Lutheran Church in Freeland, Washington on Whidbey, an island both beautiful and busy - and a place with a very familiar feel to anyone who has lived on the west coast of BC. Our host, Karl Olsen has the distinction of being a local baritone and the director of music at the church, among many other things. He and partner, Deborah Lund, have the added bonus of three children the exact same age as our own - Kaj 9, Sandra 8 and Jean 4. Deb - a former music educator - is now a full-time children's book writer, so the connections were strong (now that I am on the BC Writers web site as a gen-you-whine author I can say that..!) Needless to say, the children had a marvelous visit. And so did we. Our concert was warmly received - possibly the loudest Lutheran applause I have ever heard, as well as the loudest Lutheran singing, led by our friend Dan Erlander. We were proud that Patrick and Nicole began the tour in their very first capacity as staff, by loading in, setting up equipment and sales table. Our Oregon bass-man, Nate Macy, joined us for support on the first leg of this long journey. I had wanted to begin this tour on a strong note and Nate, with his humour and funky bass groove, helped provide that.

Saturday Sept 9, Tigard OR:
We awoke to the lush smell of coastal rain and a cold fog surrounding the trees of Karl and Deb's home. I thought we might regret having stayed up for dark chocolate, wee glasses of port and kindred conversation the night before, but we didn't. The sun was painstakingly pushing through cloud as we slid aboard the Whidbey ferry and aimed ourselves for Oregon and the outskirts of Portland.

Tigard United Methodist Church was the host venue, but the United Methodist Camp and Retreat Ministries division was the main instigator for a "Leading Singing at Camp" workshop and an evening concert. The people who came to the afternoon focus were mainly leaders of leaders, and we sang lots and shared joys and wishes about the role of music at camp. I believe that the way we lead music at camp reflects the way we lead in many other ways, and I think that music can be a very powerful tool for inviting and including and animating - instead of carving out territory, reinforcing cliques and "going gonzo", as one leader put it. It was a great conversation.

The concert was a celebration of those who had worked in camping ministry so it was preceded by a dinner in honour of volunteers and leaders, spring-loaded by Lisa Jean Hoefner. As well, David Golden's family all sat in the back row (as if they wouldn't be noticed) so of course we sang his "Three Tenors". Like we always do. David has moved from Portland to Florida, this year, and having shared a concert with him earlier this spring, we will meet up with him at his new congregation in November!

Sunday Sept 10, Lebanon OR:
When Todd Bartlett stood to introduce David and me to the congregation of Lebanon United Methodist Church this morning (That's pronounced LEB-a-nen), he told them that he had been a bit concerned to join us for the song-leading workshop the day before. Not being a born singer, he was nervous to take part in the group, but was reassured by my participatory style. 'I moderated a meeting of 400 people last week and that didn't scare me like walking into that room!' said he. I had forgotten that some people felt that way about singing. Else I might have mentioned I sometimes feel the same entering the room of my first workshop of a tour.

Our worship was led by a large group of people of different ages, each with a very thoughtful sharing of vision of their mission. Todd himself served us up a lunch in the church parlour, and drove us to a playground where the children could run off their pentecostal energy while I popped the top of our camper in the shade and gloriously had a one-hour lenten nap!

Which made me altogether ready to meet the good folks of Sweet Home United Methodist Church - one of the only 2 venues on our US circuit that are return visits. Sweet Home - which possibly may win the Church with the Best Name award by Tour's end - hosted us 2 years ago and we had a clear memory of great conversations, a warm audience and an unclear memory of something electrical. That concert was also the night we had met Nate, so it was a reunion in a few different ways. True to form, the audience sang and enjoyed warmly, we had great conversations - and the breakers blew twice. And NO, it wasn't during "Living in the Light".

Monday Sept 11, to Boise ID:
Nate and our new childcare friend, Heather Espana, agreed that we would start out on today's Great Cross-Oregon Trek at eight am, but when they lapped us in Ontario, Idaho, they told us they had missed their alarm and started at ten! By my razor-sharp math, this means that we are slow. We are averaging about 50 mph on the highway, and dawdling seriously on the uphill climbs. Our ability to really know what our mileage is has kind of run out, since we left Canada in our European van; we are getting about 60 kilometres per US gallon. Whatever that means..! Today was also the Toilets-Through-America Tour 2006, as literally every time we had waved goodbye to the last public washroom, someone would call out their sincere need for another.

The extravagant green of the Oregon forests and mountains began to give way to rolling, distant hills, but not before we had seen the blackly volcanic Mt Washington and recent forest fire damage along the highway (from the year of our own devastation in the Okanagan). The sun was glancing off the occasional still unharvested alfalfa field when Nate's old friends - Quaker pastors Shaun and Katrina McConnaughey - called us to say there were burgers on the grill for us whenever we could get there. So, David stepped on the gas pedal and rammed it up to 53, and we tore onward to Boise ID. The highway was golden and the air the unmistakable smell of onions as we made our way into the - for us - now completely new territory.

Tuesday Sept 12 Ogden UT:
How good it is to receive hospitality from people you don't even know! We gathered up all the things we had plugged in to recharge: 2 computers, 1 phone, 2 CD players and the camera battery and "tiptoed" away (take that one with a grain of salt) to head for Ogden. However, we would have done well to think more closely about what our real speed was, including lunch stops and wireless-hunting! It was a lovely drive down into Utah, and the kids and I had a great time watching our geography book closely and noting that we had changed directions and were suddenly moving into awesome, widely flung mountain ranges of purple-grey. But, it was almost six pm when we finally made it to Ogden Congregational United Church of Christ. The world's fastest load-in and set-up followed, and I don't know how we did it, but we managed to actually eat a spaghetti supper with fair grace before it was time to skip back to the church for our evening.

This one was special as it is the home of Leslie Chevalier - the illustrator of our children's book Adventures of the God Detectives. Leslie's artwork is so great and her involvement so significant at the church that I reflected to the church what a gift she must be to them. Her church school art group, children some of whom had posed for the illustrations in the God Detectives were the definite highlight of the night. Cake followed in celebration of the formal US launch of our book.

Wednesday Sept 15. Ogden and Salt Lake City:
For once, our following booking was a mere 45 minutes away, so, we vowed to make an adventure of the morning. We threw together a picnic lunch and blanket, all piled into Leslie's van, including all the Jonsson-Goods, Leslie and Jean (Leslie's daughter and Pj and Nj's new friend). And we headed down through some of the tidiest and greenest streets you could ever expect to see in the middle of the dry prairie... to the centre of Ogden - the "Union Station" railroad museum. What a morning for kids and adults! Trains from every age of rail history, a hands-on rail station to play in, a model railway racing through mountains, along the plain and across Great Salt Lake on supports. Our picnic lunch was crowned with the glory of children walking in a skinny waist-high fountain - totally soaked by the time we had to get back to Leslie's.

There Isaac decided that he would come with us to Salt Lake City - with Heather - while the two bigger kids stayed back to play too late with Jean. So, we were a smaller crew that arrived at Holladay United Church of Christ in the big city. Which only means that we can't keep blaming the kids for our being late..!

Bill Green is clearly used to hosting performers at this large church on the outskirts of the city. He had our sound all set up for us and everything in place for our concert - right down to the Smarties in the change-room. Isaac felt immediately confirmed in having chosen to accompany us. We had the excellent timing of performing on the regular congregational dinner night, so we enjoyed a meal with folks of all different ages, women who were working on a knitting project together, children in a church school evening programme and devout teens kneeling on the church lawn (OK, it turns out they were trying to eat apples off a clothesline, but impressive nonetheless)!

Our own crowd was quite small but wonderfully diverse in age, led by 4 and 5-year-old dancers, who eyed me frequently to know when the right moment would be for the promised "coming up on stage" moment. After the dance act collapsed (literally), the concert reached a gentle point and I was able to sing some reflective pieces and express my appreciation to the United Church of Christ for its important gospel living in being a church that does not exclude.

Our reservations at a local hotel had got booked-over, a coincidence which begins to make this trip look a little more like a normal tour - quirky. In recompense, we were booked in, at no charge to the church, at a ski resort a half hour out of town. While the VW might have complained at the mountain climb, we didn't. Nate shared his Polygamy Pilsner ("Why not have more than one?") - a Utah brand whose name cracked him up so much he vowed to tack the label up on his office wall. Isaac had an entire double bed with feather duvet to himself and David threatened to try out the shower whose one wall was a window facing into the bedroom - with optional inner curtain, eek.

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With thanks for your willingness to "accompany" us on our cross-country adventures,
Linnea

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