Boys of Blue Hill

Last night found us hanging out with the boys and girls of Blue Hill where we went to call a contradance... one of our best nights to date. Winter in Maine can offer some treacherous travel, but roads were clear and the drive went by quickly as we practiced some calling, listened to NPR, and ate our dinner which we brought along. Typically we're in a rush and at the last minute, as we're leaving the house, we realize we're gonna be hungry, which we almost always are, and we end up picking something up on the way. Much better prepared this time! Bananas, roast beef sandwiches and plenty of water!
Our dance program worked for most of the first half of the evening, we'd planned more dances than we had time to do before the break~ that's so much easier to deal with than scrambling for another dance out of the box of cards! The second "half" went just as well. The band was Oakum Bay String Band and they were awesome... very accomodating and helpful to this still-fairly-new-to-the-calling-scene duo. The hall is really nice, a beautiful old Greek revival building nestled right downtown. We both found it a great benefit to share the calling... it gave us time to do a little dancing ourselves, and afforded a bit of down time to take notes for one another. We remembered to record most of this dance so we'll be able to critique our performance later this morning.
Originally we planned to spend the night in Blue Hill with dance organizers, but the weather and trip had been so uneventful and we were so energized by the dance we decided to head home and fill the wood stove. What we didn't realize is that it had started lightly snowing and that it might take a while to get back. Keeping each other alert was easy though, we spent almost the entire drive talking about the dance... what was our favorite one to call, which ones did the dancers seem to love, which ones we might want to not do again, that sort of thing.
Back in Wayne we found the house still fairly warm, enough coals in the stove to get a nice fire going, and happy we were going to be in our own little house this morning!
Boys of Blue Hill is a lovely hornpipe you can find in the Fiddler's Fakebook.