Steamboat Stories, Celtic Tales, Festival and Ice Cream

It was a weekend of variety for this storyteller, as I traveled to Marietta and Dublin, Ohio for two different festivals.

Saturday found me up and out early to set up for my day of storytelling at the Inland Waterways Festival at the Ohio River Museum in Marietta. I'd been working hard all week to pull together several new stories and a new song about the early days of travel on the Ohio River and the steamboat era.

My work paid off. The audiences found the stories as compelling and intriguing as I did: a song about keelboats included a discussion of keelboats and their operation; I expanded the story of the first steamboat to travel from Pittsburgh to New Orleans with more details of the strange events of 1811 and the New Madrid earthquake; the story of the explosion on the Buckeye Belle is always of interest; and the new story about the steamboat that carried yellow fever to Gallipolis, Ohio in 1878 got rapt attention.

It was a good day, as I shared ghost stories, tall tales, and an unplanned personal story that came about due to audience questions. My sessions with small audiences like this are often more like conversations on the front porch, and not so much "performance"--they're highly interactive and I love it that way.

I stayed the night in Marietta, and then was up early again the next morning to meet my Celtic storytelling partner Judi Tarowsky for the trip to Dublin for that day's performance. Judi's husband Tom came too and did the driving, a real blessing as it left us free to talk storytelling.

Dublin was hot! Both the festival and the temperature. There were thousands of people there, and even though the thermometer hovered near 90 people seemed to be having a great time. I think this is the biggest festival I've ever been to, actually. So many tents, choices, things for sale, food, drink of all kinds. Our Spoken Word Tent was in a little area with writers and Celtic traditions, so more of a folklore/literary area. We enjoyed the Armagh Rhymers, who combined song and acting for a great performance:

We also listened to a couple portraying two 18th century grave robbers--talk about getting an education! There was a lot more to stealing corpses out of graveyards than I ever would have believed. Fascinating. I wish I'd taken some photos of them but I was too engrossed in their presentation--and got a lead on something to investigate for own of my own stories.

After our set, which went well, we meandered back to the car for the trip home. A few sites as we walked through the festival:

A huge sand sculpture featuring Irish dancers:

I'm not sure why this giant Idaho potato was there...

People were still coming in as we were leaving at 5pm. The festival ended at 10pm so there was still plenty of time to enjoy it.

One of several very large stages--this one was called the CelticRock Stage.

These two delighted me:

On the way home we stopped at Tom's Ice Cream Bowl in Zanesville, OH for supper and dessert.

I should have taken photos of the inside, because it was so cool, has never been renovated since the 40's or 50's so authentic retro. And the ice cream! I ordered two scoops and learned that one is more than enough. You get a huge bowl filled to overflowing with delicious homemade ice cream. I had to regretfully leave half of mine behind. The place was full--we found seats at the counter fortunately, because the tables filled as fast as people left. a popular place locally! And a nice find for any passing traveler. You can see at video of Tom's here.

It was good to finally get home. Larry's been working on all kinds of projects while I was away, the most important one being finding and repairing a leak in the roof. Turns out it's a bigger job that we suspected. Isn't that always the way?

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