Another very tired blog for me now. Have just returned from Italy after a fantastic festival. Rallion were asked to play in A Box of Treasures Folk Festival in Forli, which is about one hour away from Bologna in Italy. I was extremely honoured to be asked to be one of the Artistic Directors for the second year in a row, along with Antonio Mastrioanni, who has been the main organiser of the festival and whose idea it was i the first place. After what seemed like hundreds and hundreds of emails, we had it all planned and were very excited about this year's festival.

The line up this year included Calum Stewart and Heikke Bourgault. Calum coms from Moray in Scotland and plays the wooden flute and Heikke comes from Brittany and plays guitar. More about them later on...

Also in the line up were accordion ace Karen Tweed from England and Lily Neill on the harp. Lily is originaly fromthe USA but now lives in Helsinki! And of course Rallion were also there, including 2 Scots, one Englishman and a Dutch person. So we had a lovely multi-cultural weekend.

Now, because this is the second year in a row we have been to Forli, if you want ALL the details, you are probably better going to my blog I did last year about it which has lots of photos and chat about the minute details. This time, I think I will just post some photos we took and tell you about some of the more memorable moments.

Anyway, as we expected, the weather was beautiful. 36 degrees Celcius and for a sun worshipper like me it was ideal.  For an ice cream worshipper like me, it was better than ideal! Check out this freezer!







We were very pleased to have the company of our good friend Simona, who we met for the first time in Forli last year. She is a very useful person to know because she is Italian but speaks excellent English and French (and probably lots of other languages as well). So she helped with the language barriers, as my Italian has not improved as much as I had hoped since last year (okay! - not at all!). And thanks also to Roberto who was also a huge help, despite having to sleep for a few hours in a service station after the Friday gig because he was so tired he could not make it home. AND he had to get up to be a post man for 7.30am on Saturday morning and then he had the stamina to come back for more on Saturday night and helped us manning the CD stall.



 Lily, Simona and I went out for some girlie shopping and had a great time.











Lily found just the thing to wear on stage that night!







And we were also temped to buy Steve some new shoes, but we ran out of time.






Once again the food was amazing. Calum had the right idea and told everyone he was vegan so he could get all the best salads. Look at the size of that one!






Good company, good food (they had chips! ) and great weather. What more could we want.






Once again we had the pleasure of being driven about by the best driver in the business - Giovanni Maria Matteo! Or Big John, as we cal him. And this year he had a swanky new van too. Thanks Giovanni!!!







As well as a "Big John", there was also a "Little John". Big and Little John are very good friends, as we can see from this picture. : ))))







Now, some other highlights of the weekend were the very professional sound guys who did an excellent job and worked really hard. Er, they were quite good looking as well ; )))







Thanks a lot Marco, Rodrigo, Alberto and Davide.

Karen seemed to like them too, given that she decided to play the accordion with no clothes on! (Look carefully...)







Anyway, enough of that! We had two gigs to do. One of Friday evening and one on Saturday evening. The gigs were at a lovely open air stage and were well attended and we met loads of enthusiastic people. Even some people from South Korea who had come to Forli during a tour they were making especially to see Karen! That is dedication for you. We also got everyone on stage at the end to perform together and we managed to get a great version of "Ye Jacobites" sorted out which went down well. Hopefully more professional photos or videos will appear over the next few days and I will put them up here as well. In the meantime however, you will just have to make do with my amateur efforts.



So with the gigs all over, it was time for some tunes in the pub.



Karen on the box! (with clothes this time since it was a bit cooler)





Heikke and Lily.






We just had to try some Italian wine while we were there....






Karen and Calum...







And now some miscellaneous, dark photos with me trying to be arty, and failing...Spot the empty chocolate wrappers on the table in this first one. Lily has a dark secret - she has a total chocolate addiction, like I have never seen before. But only the best will do for Lily, and this chocolate was THE best!











Calum and Heikke serenading us out of their window...







The place we were staying was great once again. The only drawback was that as I got into bed after the last gig and a great session at the pub (at 6am!), a big crane was erected outside my window and the building work started. Which was not really conducive to sleep. But as any regular readers will know, I am quite an expert at not sleeping all weekend so that was not a problem.

So feeling a bit weary, we made our way home after my third visit to Forli. I hope it won't be my last. The people there now feel more like friends than anything else and I love going back to visit and play music (and eat ice cream, and sunbathe and eat pizza and sunbathe and..... Well, you get the picture). 

Thanks so much to Antonio, Patrizia and the two Giovannis for looking after us so well and making it a weekend to remember. Check out the festival's MySpace page if you can. It would make a fantastic weekend for anyone. Hopefully it will go ahead again next year. Watch this space! I'm off for a sleep.