Yesterday we departed early for our concert in St. Jean du Muzols. All of us were sort of dreading the long drive ahead of us, but were pleasantly surprised when we arrived early in the town of Tain-l’Hermitage. For you chocolate lovers out there, this town happens to have the Valrhona Chocolate factory within its bounds – NIRVANA! I nearly cried as I ran from display to display, stuffing my basket with all of the delicious confections, sampling Valrhona dark chocolate ice cream and snarfing so many free chocolate samples that I was practically ill. After we purchased boat loads of chocolate, the cashiers stuffed even more free samples into our bags! We then decided to make a quick stop at the town of Tournon-on-Rhône for about an hour to sample the winding roads of this lively city right on the river. I had to find a drug store that carried some aloe for my severe sunburn. After we left the town, Molly was treated to an unexpected fetid tomato juice shower on the bus followed by some peach rain which required a change of clothes and a purging of shoes (someone had unfortunately forgotten to remove these perishable items from the overhead compartment above Molly’s seat).
The church in St. Jean du Muzols had a wonderful acoustic (probably the best on this trip thus far) which afforded us a magnificent sound check and concert. I am very excited to see what we get on our video recording. We did a particularly amazing rendition of Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep.” The audience was extremely appreciative and called us back for two encores! (We could have done three, but we needed to save our voices for our Cathedral concert in Vaison today) After the concert we were treated to a wine reception with MORE FREE VALRHONA CHOCOLATE. Antioch got on the bus at 11pm for what we hoped would be an uneventful two-hour trip home… until we got stuck at the tollbooth for 30 minutes after our driver Marcel’s toll-card got eaten by the machine. We got home around 1:45am. More about our big Vaison Cathedral concert to follow.
Mercy Buckets,
Josh
Chocolate, SVP
Have really enjoyed the blog!