I’m a little behind with blogging at the moment. A lot has been happening. I’ve been abroad twice since the last major post. From the middle of August until the beginning of September, I was in Spain for two weeks. We went on a holiday in Salu. But, I’ll write about that in much more detail complete with pictures in the next few days. This blog post will instead focus on the trip to Italy I’m just back from as with five days of returning from my two week holiday in Spain, I was flying off again to do a five day tour around Italy to play music with the Willin Fools .

We stayed around Padua and Lake Garda this time with gigs in Malcesine, Padua and Torbole to name a few. In fact, I can only name a few because I don’t remember the name of the city we played in last even though it was by far the largest of the gigs with over five thousand people in attendants.

For those of you who are not long time readers, I play with a group called the Willin Fools . The band has the following musicians and instruments.

Damian on drums
Toaster – AKA David on bass.
Connor on mandolin.
Me on pipes bodhran and whistles
And finally, this time, we had Oliver on guitar and vocals.

We tour around Italy a few times a year generally between May and October and we’re always received very well. There’s never a gig where everyone is not dancing. There’s a huge difference between playing for Irish crowds and Italians, Germans, French and other nationalities. They seem to be more relaxed. When they go to enjoy themselves, they do just that without letting anything stand in their way.

It’s also great to see a few regulars from year to year. Depending on the towns or cities we’re playing in, we usually find at least four or five people returning again from the previous years.

Enough with all the writing. Let’s get to a few pictures and videos.

Let me take this oppertunity to thank Peeno and everyone else for organizing these tours. There’s nothing more we could possibly ask for. Everything is catered for and they do everything they can to make sure that we enjoy it.

So, now for a few videos. These are straight from Youtube.

I’m not overly happy with these. The tuning of the pipes, the sound quality and the background noise would make them less than I’d usually want to post but it would be a shame to post nothing.