Looking Ahead

In the midst of what is forecast to be a week of gray skies and rain, it's pleasant to look ahead to our late summer/early autumn vacation, which this year will begin with a flight across the US/Canadian border to Toronto.

We'd never thought of visiting Toronto, but here's why we're going -- after joining other members of the now-inactive Seattle Welsh Choir to sing the Welsh national anthem and the beloved hymn "Calon Lan" at a former chorister's memorial service in February, Phil and I realized how much we missed singing that music. (We met in Seattle Welsh Choir, and left the choir after we moved to Bellingham in 2002.)

In the past 14 years, we've been to six of the annual festivals presented by the organization now known as the Welsh North American Association (founded in 1929 as the Welsh National Gymanfa Ganu Association), which has as its mission "to preserve, develop and promote our Welsh cultural heritage including, but not limited to, the Gymanfa Ganu, literature, cultural traditions, and to do all such things necessary and proper to accomplish and enhance the same."

We've seen Utica, New York; Columbus, Ohio; Minneapolis, Minnesota; San Jose, California; Richmond, British Columbia (near Vancouver); and Portland, Oregon, thanks to attending these festivals. And we've sung our hearts out at each one, adding our voices to hundreds of others at the afternoon and evening sessions of the gymanfa ganu (congregational singing of Welsh hymns in four-part harmony, in both Welsh and English).

But it's not all singing -- there are seminars, Welsh language classes, a bilingual church service, banquet, tours of the host city, visiting guest artists, and always a featured Welsh choir, which at this year's North American Festival of Wales will be Côr Meibion Pontarddulais, a renowned male voice choir from south Wales, near Swansea.

And after the last hymn is sung late on Sunday evening, September 1, we will pack our suitcases for another adventure, heading out the next day for a second place we've never seen before (more about that next week), and who knows, we might do a little singing there, too -- but not in Welsh or English.