August 9, 2008
Tonight we went to a dinner concert at The Hitching Post Restaurant in Hedley. Excellent meal. Excellent entertainment. The group performing was Darrel de la Ronde & Saskia, sometimes a duo and sometimes a trio. Tonight they were a trio. Darrel de la Ronde and his wife Saskia are a married couple about our age. He is a Métis from northern Saskatchewan. She is from Holland. They are singers and songwriters. During the summer they are accompanied by Tom, their drummer friend with a motorhome. When Tom tours with them they all live in Tom's motorhome. Tom spends the winters in Costa Rica. Their music crosses many lines ; folk, blues, bluegrass, rock and roll, and ballads. Most of the music they perform is their own compositions. They have won Canadian music awards for Aboriginal Artist Of The Year and Aboriginal Album Of The Year.
During one of their rest breaks I went over and chatted with Tom, about RV'ing and Costa Rica. After the concert I chatted briefly with Tom and Saskia. I extended an invitation to them to stay on our lot at Riverside RV Park next time they are touring through the South Okanagan area.
August 10, 2008
Today we went to Penticton for an afternoon matinee performance of S.S. Sicamous Follies and a bit more of Peach Festival. Joanne prepared a picnic lunch, and our first stop was Skaha Lake Park to have lunch and see the sand castles built a couple of days ago for the Peach Festival Sand Castle Competition on Skaha Lake Beach. Well, it had rained quite heavily yesterday, and only one large sand castle had survived the rain.
The S.S. Sicamous is an old sternwheeler built in 1914. She worked from 1914 to 1936 on Okanagan Lake, and was a very important mode of transportation in the Okanagan Valley, operated by Canadian Pacific Railway. She was pulled up onto Okanagan Lake Beach in 1951, has since been restored, and is now an entertainment venue and museum. S.S. Sicamous Follies is a musical theatre production put on each summer. This year the S.S. Sicamous Follies 100 is a tribute to musicals, starting back at Rogers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma, and to Penticton's 100th birthday. We have attended a lot of live theatre, in a lot of different places, some of it good, some of it not so good. S.S. Sicamous Follies 100 was ... okay. I now measure how bad a musical theatre performance is by how it compares to the awful production our friends Erbon and Lorraine invited us to attend with them in Port Aransas, Texas a year and a half ago. Today's performance wasn't as bad as that. HA HA HA !
After the performance we wandered around the rose gardens adjacent to the S.S. Sicamous, and then we wandered out onto the dam that separates Okanagan Lake from the Okanagan River Channel that flows from Okanagan Lake through Penticton to Skaha Lake. We drove from where we were parked on the west side of Okanagan Lake near the S.S. Sicamous over to the east side of Okanagan Lake and parked near Okanagan Lake Park. We walked along the shoreline until we found the fenced in, off leash dog beach. Maybe we'll take Bo there sometime. We set up our folding chairs in Okanagan Lake Park and watched a performance on the Peach Festival Stage by Blue Brothers Too, a local tribute duo.
DSK
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