July 4, 2016

The Start of our Long Road Trip – Yosemite National Park

At the start of the Fourth of July weekend, we drove out of the San Francisco Bay Area, and headed for the first stop on an exciting and long road trip!

We spent the first couple of nights in Oakhurst, 14 miles south of the entrance to Yosemite National Park. On Saturday, we drove into the park to spend the day there.

Long Road Trip - Sentinel Beach — Sentinel Beach

Yosemite National Park has 1,200 square miles of mountains, waterfalls, meadows and ancient sequoias The views are breathtaking, and there are endless opportunities for walking. If you’re not into hiking in the heat of the summer, you can also to tour the park by car. When you see something interesting, you can get out of the car and follow one of the short trails. These are very accessible, even for families with young children.

We took the opportunity to play a few handbell duets while we were at Yosemite. It was the Fourth of July weekend, so the park was quite busy. That made it a challenge to find a place that wasn’t too crowded with people. We’ve read that four million people visit the park annually – and we became convinced that most of them were there this weekend!

Eventually we found somewhere quiet, and played our handbells for a while. Here’s a recording of “America, the Beautiful”, which seemed appropriate for the holiday weekend:

This was our second trip to Yosemite since Carla moved to California in 2012. It’s a place that Carla spent years wanting to visit, when she lived in England – and we’re happy to have been able to go there together. It’s truly a breathtaking experience!

For more photos from our weekend at Yosemite, check out our Facebook page!

July 21, 2015

New Music for Handbells – Come Christians, Join to Sing

While we were in Soledad for our #Pinnacles15 adventure, we played through some of our brand new, unpublished pieces. Come Christians, Join to Sing is one of these new pieces.

We didn’t want to annoy other hotel guests by playing handbells in our room. So we decided to find another practice location instead. We chose the pretty church of Our Lady of Solitude in Soledad. We played outside the church, as the sun went down and the light became poorer and poorer. Yes, it was pretty, and fairly quiet. No, it was not easy to see our music!

Here’s Come, Christians, which actually isn’t completely new to us. We’ve played it a couple of times recently in church services. For some unknown reason, we completely forgot to record or publish it until now. It’s a fun and lively arrangement of the Spanish hymn tune Madrid.

Would you like to play this arrangement?

If you’d like to play Come Christians, Join to Sing, the music is available for purchase and download from Choraegus.

If you haven’t bought music from Choraegus before, we recommend reading our step-by-step guide. Your purchase (pay once) entitles you to print up to 4 copies for your group. Please read our licensing agreement for full details.

Any questions?

If you have any questions, please get in touch, and we’ll be happy to help!

July 19, 2015

Not the National Seminar – Our #Pinnacles15 Adventure!

Unlike many of our handbell friends, we didn’t make it to this year’s National Seminar – Pinnacle – in Dallas, Texas. We read lots of news about this exciting event on Facebook. The whole thing was so awesome that it even had its own hashtag on social media – #Pinnacle15.

We’re not the kind of people to sit around and sulk because we were missing out on all the fun in Texas. Instead, we decided to have a handbell adventure of our own here in California. We packed our bells and equipment into the car, and away we went!

Here we are at our destination – PINNACLES!

Our very own handbell event

We checked in at a hotel in the nearby town of Soledad, and our handbell event – #Pinnacles15 – began.

Here’s a picture of the church where we held our Friday evening duet session. We played through some new and unpublished music outside the church of Our Lady of Solitude.

And here’s our opening night dinner. Hey, put your phone away, Larry!

Here’s Larry wearing our event t-shirt:

Here are some of our bells in the hotel room:

Here’s Carla wearing her “Hug Larry if you love Tico Tico” shirt:

Larry held a handbell polishing session:

Wait. Handbell polishing? THAT’S not how you do it, Larry!

Here’s Larry wearing his “Kiss me if you love Tico Tico” shirt. These shirts were worn by handbell musicians from Area 12 at Distinctly Bronze West in February 2015.

Here’s Carla, showing her skills at multi-tasking as she works on music for the Bay View Week of Handbells while drinking coffee!

We enjoyed the opportunity to do some sightseeing in the area too. Here’s a picture of the Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, where we played some of our duets inside and outside the chapel on Saturday morning:

And here we are at the Mission San Juan Bautista, which we visited on Saturday afternoon:

Larry and Carla - Mission San Juan Bautista

Our handbell event was over far too quickly, because we had to be home on Sunday morning, to play duets in a church service in San Jose. But we had a fun couple of days – and you can see more photos from our trip on our Facebook page!

April 17, 2015

Did We Manage a Weekend Vacation Without Handbells?

Taking a vacation without handbells is clearly a challenge! We spent a lovely long weekend visiting Yosemite National Park. The plan was to enjoy a few days in beautiful surroundings, without the pressure of rehearsals or concerts. That’s quite unusual for us, because we usually only stay away from home when we’re attending a handbell event.

But did we leave our handbells at home?

Well, no. We still took our handbells with us. After all, there was always the possibility we might decide to rehearse in the hotel! Or we might be driving past a wedding and be called upon to play duets. We might even get a sudden phone call asking us to play at a church service. Oh, who are we kidding? It just didn’t seem right to go away for a long weekend without taking the bells with us. Perhaps it is an addiction after all.

We left the bells in the hotel for three whole days without taking them out of the case. But on Sunday morning, we could ignore them no longer, and we decided to find somewhere to rehearse. Just moments away from our hotel in Oakhurst was the Little Church on the Hill – the perfect location!

Vacation without handbells - Little Church on the Hill

Sadly, it turned out not to be such a perfect location, because we were competing with lots of traffic noise – but still, we spent an hour or so playing through some of the music we haven’t played for a while, and we had a great time. Here are some excerpts of the pieces we played:

The idea of a vacation without handbells was nice while it lasted, but turned out to be an impossible goal for us. We hope to be able to play at the Little Church again someday – maybe on our next trip to Yosemite!