Tour Log 9: Final Reflection and Thank You
Monday 28 April 2008
So, that was it. Another great tour was finally over, with some wonderful experiences and many lifetime memories. The success of the tour belongs to many people, under the leadership of Mr Heath and Mrs Belshaw, but as an observing parent, I take my hat off to the thorough professionalism of all of the staff, who were on duty 24 hours a day, and handled every little crisis with care and primary attention to the welfare of the young people under their charge. Well done to Mr Heath, Mrs Belshaw, Mr Kightley, Mrs Middlebrook, Mr Starr, Mr Belling, Mr Harding, Ms Brown, Ms Irvine and the younger Mr Grey. And, of course, there are those who helped organise things in Sydney, but did not go on tour themselves, including Ms Workman and Mr Rays.
A special mention needs to be made of certain other people, Darren and Tammy Heath loaded and unloaded that instrument truck time after time, and navigated their way round half of Europe, without ever getting lost (except for that drive from Pegau to Leipzig, when Darren’s GPS spat the dummy...), and always managed to retain their composure and dry senses of humour.
Our trip was also made very much easier by the skill and easy going nature of our Slovakian driver, Csaba, who despite his limited English, became Darren’s new best friend, and managed that coach into places where you wondered if he would need a shoehorn to get it out again.
Special thanks goes to ACFEA and Robert Latimer who put together the tour so well, and made sure we had such good audiences wherever we went.
The last vote of thanks goes to the person who received the largest and most sustained round of applause at our final dinner on Saturday night. Sophie Bauer was our constant companion for the whole of the tour, and worked tirelessly to fix every little problem and deal with every query, always with a bright smile and German efficiency. She also acted as Mr Heath’s translator for his concert introductions throughout Germany, mostly coping quite well with the unexpected changes of wording he managed to introduce every time! It was our great pleasure during the last few concerts to equip Sophie with a performance jacket and an Akubra hat and have her up there singing with the rest of the ensemble. I think the audiences just thought she was a German exchange student at St Andrew’s.
Well, that’s it from me, and I hope you enjoyed these reports and the photos that accompanied them. I have a hard drive full of HD video from two cameras (for which I thank my unit 2 cameramen Jo Ladd, George Tefas and Greg Turner), and CD quality sound recordings of each concert, so I hope to have a DVD available within a couple of months or so. As we did last time, we will probably have a tour reunion to swap stories and see the DVD.
So long!
