We all went north today. Jerry had to leave for Leeds, and John, Vicki, and I were headed to North Wales. Before we left John walked around the neighborhood a bit. It was a lovely morning.
Vicki drove all the way. I do pretty well at driving on the left side of the road until I have to take a left or right turn, so I think it was just as well we had an expert behind the wheel. We headed through Oxfordshire and headed towards Birmingham. We then turned to Shrewsbury and went through Shropshire. Before we knew it we were in the small town of Llangollen. It took a bit more time to find our accommodations. But after stopping to ask some directions - always so hard for us men - we finally located the Horseshoe Pass Holiday Lets. We had a huge two bedroom cottage.
The cottage was located a couple miles outside of town. The scenery could not have been more classically British.
The village of Llangollen is quite cute. We will have to explore it some more tomorrow. For this even, we only had time for a quick supper at a tea shop. We sat outdoors. We were a trifle bored waiting for our meals.
The reason we had come to Llangollen was for its celebrated eisteddfod or music festival. The name of the town, by the way, sounds something vaguely like thlanGOCHTHlen. You have to be Welsh to be able to say it. But you do not have to be Welsh to enjoy the music here, and amateurs and professional musicians and performers from around the world come here each year to compete. The festival officially opens tomorrow, but its first big event was a concert performance of Steven Sondheim’s masterpiece, Sweeney Todd.
This was absolutely wonderful. The lead role was played masterfully by the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel.
He completely captured the manic intensity of “the demon barber of Fleet Street” as well as singing the difficult role perfectly. The rest of the cast ranged for decent to quite good.
