Trumpet player and Vice Chairman Adam Wright gives us his personal tour highlights.
After a week of snow, -30C temperatures and an emergency landing (our plane broke whilst flying into Ottawa), we have arrived to glorious sunshine on the West Coast for the final week of our USA 2012 tour. The trip so far has been successful and hugely enjoyable. Playing-wise my highlights so far have been the joint concert in Ottawa with the National Arts Centre Orchestra – who were was brilliant to meet and perform with – and the concert in Chicago with Maestro Dutoit.
The joint trombones and tubas of the RPO and NACO - quite a sound!
It’s always difficult being away from our families for such a long period, but by enjoying ourselves and having fun the time passes a lot quicker. We stay in a lot of hotels every year, and if you just stay inside you don’t get to see much of the city you’re in, so we try to make a point of getting out and wandering around to get a feel for each place. This can result in finding some amazing places to eat and drink, such as the restaurant we found in Louisville, a city I’ve never visited before. When we arrived I didn’t have much hope for finding anywhere really nice to eat, but we ended up having the best meal of the trip so far in a brilliant little restaurant called Jack Fry’s. Some cocktails to get us in the mood, amazing fish starters, sublime meat main courses and huge puddings (plus a few bottles of wine) resulted in an excellent evening, along with a bit of a fuzzy head the next morning! I can thoroughly recommend it to anybody visiting Louisville.
We also like to fit in a game of golf whenever we can. When we are in the UK I don’t get the chance to play any more, so my golfing is reserved for tours – in fact the last time I played was on our last tour here in 2008! As you can imagine I was a little rusty for the first couple of rounds we played in West Palm Beach, and was a great disappointment to our Chairman, Andy, who had the unfortunate privilege of being partnered with me against two much more competitive members of the orchestra. Needless to say we came second, and my individual score was so poor that people gave up counting! Luckily a morning off in Palm Springs offered the perfect opportunity to redeem myself. I was one of only two of us to clear the water on the 1st hole,and thought my game was improving, but as you can see from the photo below it all fell apart when I found a tree between my ball and the green!
Spot the ball...
We have four more days left of our month-long tour, and whilst I can’t wait to get back and see my family it has been a brilliant trip and I’m already looking forward to coming back in 2014.
