Catskills Irish Arts Week

And...on to the Catskills Irish Arts Week, which was held from July 12-19. We've never been to this before – I've heard about it for years, but it was all the way across the country and there was always something else to do in the summer. Finally, there we were and it certainly was an experience. We drove down on Sunday and stopped in Plattsburgh, NY for lunch, a book for me, and a swimsuit for William, and then we got to our cabin at the Emerald Motel at about 5 or 6. The original plan was to share one cabin among 6 people, but the owners really wanted us to take two cabins (for more money, of course) so we wouldn't be too crowded. In some ways, I'm glad we did that but in others, it was a really bad idea. More on that later.

CIAW is held in and among the towns of East Durham, Cairo, Oak Hill, and Freehold. The entire area is about 10-15 miles long and even locations in the same town are fairly spread out. There are classes during the day and sessions at night, and if there's nothing scheduled at night in a particular pub it's generally alright to go in and start playing. What this all comes down to is this: you either have to have a car or friends with a car, unless you REALLY like biking or walking long distances at 1 am on the side of a main road. You can take one class in the morning and/or one in the afternoon. There are lectures in the late afternoon and a concert every night, along with the sessions led by the music teachers. Since we didn't take classes, our days looked something like this: Get up around 11 or 12, lunch, get online and/or go out for groceries and/or practice for a few hours, dinner around 6 or 7, get in the car at 8 or 9 and start making the rounds of the East Durham night life. Generally we agreed on where we wanted to start out with the scheduled events – the only problem with this was that if someone we wanted to hear was leading an open session, it meant that about 80 other people wanted to be there too and play along, which led to semi-organized chaos and resulted in us not wanting to stick around for very long. After midnight the scheduled events were over and then we just wandered around from pub to pub looking for a) good musicians playing b) interesting tunes with c) 10 or less people total. Needless to say, this combination didn't happen very often but we did our best and had some lovely early morning sessions with wonderful people and decent beer. We generally got home about 3 am; our cabin-mates were more likely to stay up until 5 or so but we have not yet reached that level of fortitude.

So that's about how we spent our week. On the positive side, some of the best Irish musicians in the world were there...we heard Mike Rafferty, Willy Kelly, Liz and Yvonne Kane, Michael Rooney and June McCormack, Jackie Daly, Matt Cranitch, Benedict Koehler, Blackie O'Connell, Paul De Grae, bohola, Pat and Laura Egan, Joanie Madden, Kate McNamara, Charlie Coen...and so on. For food, the Oak Hill Kitchen is a wonderful place, especially if you're hungry at 2 or 3 am. The Catskills area is lovely if you like being in a forest, which we do, and we did get out one day to do a bit of sightseeing. The people we stayed with were good musicians and lots of fun to be around, and we got in a LOT of playing over the week.

But then there were the cabins. Accommodations at the Catskills are legendary – we've heard stories of bedbugs, caved-in roofs and collapsed floors, people waking up in the middle of the night with something chewing on the ceiling. We got a functional kitchen and bathroom, hot water, and a bed that only sagged a bit in the middle. Also, the air conditioner worked. But, by the end of the week, most of our cabin (only ours, not the other one that we almost shared) was covered with what we think were carpet beetles. They got into our clothes and shoes – it was easy enough to get rid of them by putting everything into the laundry and running the shoes through the dryer, but it really wasn't that much fun to deal with. And, to top off our adventures for the week, on Thursday afternoon I noticed it smelled like something was burning in the hotel lobby...further investigation revealed that the lady of the house (the owners' house was attached to the lobby and the actual motel, not to the cabins) had left a pan of rice on the stove and then disappeared. The house was full of smoke when we figured out what was going on but there was no real harm done except I think the cat was extremely disgruntled with the whole affair.

Will we go back? Probably. This is like Mecca for Irish musicians and we really did have a lot of fun. However, there are other camps and events that I would like to check out and we can't do everything. I think we'll give it a couple of years and then contemplate doing it again...but I think we'll either stay in a B&B outside of East Durham or bring a tent.