Last week, just before Christmas, our friend Ted Lehmann celebrated his fifth blogniversary. December 22 marked his fifth year publishing commentary, photos and bluegrass travelogues at Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms.
Lehmann is a retired educator who is spending his post-classroom years seeing the country with his wife, Irene. Together they visit bluegrass festivals and events across the US, journeying from their New England home to far-flung parts of the bluegrass world.
To note the milestone, Ted put together a look back at 2011 which included this impressive tally.
During the past year, although we were forced by the economy to eliminate Florida from our schedule, we still spent 148 nights on the road, 133 of them in our 26 foot travel trailer. We increased the number of state and city parks we stayed in, thus vastly improving the quality of our camping experience. We spent fifteen nights in motels or hotels when travel requirements or convenience suggested that would be a better alternative, always finishing such trips telling each other how much we preferred our little trailer. We attended seventeen bluegrass festivals, including five that were new to us. Joe Val in Boston, the two new festivals at Newell Lodge in Folkston, GA, RenoFest in Hartsdale, SC, and the Tennessee Fall Homecoming in Norris, TN were all new to us, and we’ll re-visit most of them. We also returned to Willow Oak Bluegrass Festival in Roxboro, TN, which has been re-imagined and resurrected with many improvements by Mike Wilson. We count that as a new festival for us, too. We also attended thirteen other bluegrass events in a variety of settings. From concerts at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, MA to a benefit at the Essex County Fairgrounds featuring the Gibson Brothers, we went where the music called. It shouldn’t be surprising that many such events featured our friends The Gibson Brothers and/or Darin & Brooke Aldridge. For almost all these events I posted a preview and one or more accounts of the daily activities. This, in addition to the essays, book reviews, and other occasional pieces has resulted in about 159 total posts for the 2011 calendar year. The most previous posts for any year came in 2009 with 140. My guess is that things will slow down a little in coming years, as we both reached age 70 this year.
We have shared many of Ted’s photos here at Bluegrass Today, and thank him for his generosity as we offer our congratulations on this anniversary.
