19th April - Life's good - sing and have a laugh

Well we've just had a fabulous couple of months. At the beginning of March it was boiling hot (we still had days in the high 30's) and then after 2 weeks, we thought the good weather was over but except for 4 days of slightly cooler weather, it's been glorious for the last 5 weeks.

For Easter we went to Byron Bay with a bunch of friends to experience the amazing East Coast Blues & Roots Festival. In it's 19th year, it was bigger than ever. Only one of the group had ever been and for Lillian and Mark, it was something they wanted to do for the last 10yrs! It's a 5-day music event with 5 different stages and fantastic local and international music artists from 11am till 11.30pm daily!

The hardest thing is figuring out the program and where you want to be. We organised a fabulous house to rent in Byron Bay itself and the local council or BluesFest organisers coordinated buses to run from the town centre to Belongil (where the event was being held), about 3 kms out of town on rotation for most of the day and night. For $3 each way, per person it was a pretty good service!

The house had sleeping for 6 in the main house and a bungalow that slept two out the back, which we had. Thanks very much to the guys!

We went swimming and surfing (Cath & Darren are big surfers) every day and also explored the Byron area by sea kayak (Tam & Mark) and hired a car for the final day and went into the hinterland outside Byron for the day with Lil & Rod. We had spectacular weather the whole time and were actually too hot (rtisking sunburn on several days) as it felt like 29 degrees up there!

Mark got to see some of his all-time wanted acts like - Seasick Steve, The Music Makers Foundation, Mavis Staples and Rodriguez y Gabriela. There was also great names like John Butler Trio, the Cat Empire and Cruel Sea.

We also celebrated Rod's birthday a little late with a lovely meal at Dish Restaurant and tried out massages and other indulgent activities. It was a beautiful way to unwind after a pretty intense 3 months at work.

Coming home to Melbourne, we jumped straight into Comedy Festival which has over 100 international and local acts for 3 weeks each day from 6pm till 11pm Tues - Sun. We have a philosophy of going to see at least 50% of shows by people we've never heard of. Sometimes this brings amazing rewards (like Little Howard, Big Howard from a few years ago) and other times, they are less than memorable (like an act whose name I've forgotten but ended up with fake blood being thrown at a girl tied up in some horror chamber).

This year we missed the opening weekend whilst in Byron, but managed to see 6 individual shows (Tues, Thurs and Sat nights) and the Moosehead Awards on the final Sunday which is a wrap up show whose proceeds go to fostering unknown acts to travel to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and develop their talent. The highlight this year was Andy Muirhead's show. He's a favourite of ours from Collectors (ABC TV, Friday nights) and we saw his show last year in a very dingy night spot down several back alleys in Melbourne). This year he was in an obscure room in the Town Hall but more salubrious.

Now we're feeling a bit down after the 'natural highs' of these fantastic events and need to get back into normal life!