Duck goes Folk

It was billed, in a rare case of truth in advertising, as a luxurious spa/mud-bath within convenient driving distance of the city. The mud-bath formerly known as the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

With all the general wetness in the province of Manitoba these days, it was no surprise that Bird's Hill Park, by nature of its being a part of this province, was a soppy mess even before the party got started. Add hundreds of thousands of Folkie footsteps and the equation invariably turns to mud. But a little dirt and water is not a thing to scare away a duck, and so Blue and her sister (Monkey Duck) decided to make the trip out of the city for the day to get hippy with it.

Which is how they ended up waiting at a random bus stop in the middle of nowhere at 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. In a series of events nothing short of miraculous, they did NOT miss their bus, they realized that they had NOT NOT missed their bus in time to not be making a foolish attempt to manually walk it to the next bus stop, and actually noticed the Folk Festival bus stop as they passed it by instead of gettting off at the wrong stop as they had previously intended.

Little Blue learned today that it is very easy to spot a Folk Festival bus stop. Just look for all the people in tie-dyed sarongs carrying beach chairs.

So. That was the hard part. The fun part was everything that came after. Excluding the eternal bus ride in the convection oven disguised as a bus, perhaps. The fun part? That was being, from morning until afternoon, surrounded by noise. Guitars, fiddles, violins, drums, digeridoos, hurdy-gurdies, pennywhistles, water taps, mini-cart wheels and ten thousand voices. Music - anywhere, everywhere you went.

And then, of course, the abundant opportunity to personally test the healing properties of Manitoba mud on one's feet.