TUGGER Orlando “Meeting”

  As most of you know, we host an annual get-together at the Golden Coral on Vineland in Kissimmee and this year was no exception.

     We all had a great time, and about 27 people came, many new people, and some coming and going throughout the time. The very last people left at 9 pm (we stood in the doorway for a while and talked.) It's great to move about after each new plate and then you get to talk to most everyone.
Here are pictures of some of the persons that attended:

On to Fort Myers!

Since we were staying in Star Island for the TUG meeting, we stayed an extra day in order to drive to Fort Myers to see Ron’s aunt Juanita.  We try to see her every year, but, admittedly, it was closer from Weston when we stayed there (just 2 hours) instead of from St Augustine, so leaving from Orlando (with “just” a 3-hour drive) wasn’t so bad.  But the one-day trip – 6 hours for us – is getting harder.

We had a great visit and went to the Shrimp Shack for lunch with the whole family there – and it is a delicious restaurant too!

     Ron took his computer so he could share his mother’s memorial pictures with her sister, so that was super as she had been unable to travel to Minnesota in September!

   

To Boca Raton and Natalie: A Trumpet Competition

Natalie was chosen as one of the eight finalists (from dozens of audition tapes sent in) to perform and compete at Lynn University in Boca Raton!  So we drove down from St Augustine and stayed 3 nights (January 8-11 at an Airbnb in Lake Worth) about 20 minutes north of the campus. Her bio in that program      The competition is in memory of a famous trumpet player [we had not heard of him though] who was offered a spot in the Boston Pops at the age of 16 and he had many students, of course, and some from Lynn University too.  It is for full-time college students up to the age of 27.  The schedule was for the 8 semi-finalists to play on Thursday, then the judges would perform a concert Thursday night (which was fabulous!) and the 3 finalists would play on Friday night.      Although she wasn’t to play until 1:30 p.m.Thursday, we wanted to hear all the players, so we arrived in time to hear them all and Joan took notes on them all!

We then got together with Natalie and Alexa, her friend and pianist (her teacher at UCLA had said “You always take your own pianist!”) and had so much fun.  They had only been using Uber from place to place and they were happy that we had a car.  We took them to their Airbnb then to change their clothes and we watched Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” (on Natalie’s Disney+) while waiting for the evening concert.      So we had SEVEN hours of trumpet music that day!  How fun! It was so much fun being with them and we were so glad we had been able to go. We drove home (that is “home” being St Augustine) Saturday morning. Follow-up note:  Natalie played her solo also at the “All-Star” Concert at UCLA and we were able to watch it live-streamed.  Again to get to play, she had to audition.