Deckman-

It really was a great trip for us but it's also great to be back home! I did miss swapping songs with you and several others on this trip but I'm sure I'll be back out in a couple of years. The Pacific Northwest can be addictive. The Coast of Maine ain't too shabby either!

There isn't really a whole lot to add with regard to our musical experience in this thread. With better planning I might have been able to make more contacts but we didn't have a lot of flexibility with regard to our schedule. I was lucky to have done as much as I did: one major concert, a floor set, and several music swaps and sessions. And I did manage to sow a goodly number of CD's in what looked like fertile soil.

Of course I could say a whole lot more about the fun of prowling around Victoria. The well established Chinatown is still a jewel, with its small traditional shops, Fan Tan Alley, and restaurants. This time I found a really good family restaurant in the back of a bakery shop, not listed anywhere in the tourist guides; everything was fresh and delicious and no fortune cookies were offered after the meal! The long term residents of Victoria we met typically mourn the loss of "Old Victoria" but so did C. Fox Smith a hundred years before as she mused:

Has it gone beyond my finding, gone forever, ship and man,
Far beyond that scarlet sunset, flaming down behind Japan?
But perhaps I'll find the dream there that I lost so long ago,
Half across the world to westward, in a harbour that I know.

Alas, the port she knew has indeed "grown strange" from what she experienced but it's still a very beautiful harbor city, and with a very robust folk music community.

There is a touch of irony that the poem I did find while sifting through the newspaper archives was "The Long Road Home," almost as if it were a message from the poet herself!

Cheerily,
Charley Noble