Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

Of course it's all very well making up your mind whereabouts you want to go but that doesn't solve the complicated logistical problem of how to get 30 or so excited tourers plus all their luggage, instruments and music to where they want to go. After much research, we eventually selected the lovely folk at Thomas Coaches in the Rhondda Valley in Wales. I've used them for a couple of tours with other groups in the past and always found them to be very friendly and helpful, not to mention extremely reasonably priced...in fact, cheaper than all the firms based near the band in Reading! Here's one of their lovely shiny executive coaches - just the job for a small army of people with tubas, drum kits, euphoniums and all manner of other music-related junk!

Once we get to Gent, we've decided to stay at the Hotel Ibis Gent Centrum Opera. This hotel is about a ten minute walk from the centre of the city and should be really convenient for seeing the sights and exploring all that Gent has to offer.

As the name suggests, the hotel is close to the city's Opera House (about 200m away) - Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake will be showing whilst we're there! It is also, however, close to the King Albert Park, a botanical garden created on the site of the city's original railway station and a ten minute walk from the iconic Castle of the Counts, complete with mediaeval moat!

Destination: Belgium

The first question after deciding to go on tour was, naturally, where?!

For our first tour, we didn't want to bite off more than we could chew so, after much deliberation, we settled on going a short hop over the channel to beautiful Belgium, specifically, to Gent. Located in the north-west of Belgium, between capital Brussels, Antwerp and Bruges, Gent is Brussel's fourth largest city in terms of population and can be traced back all the way to 650 AD when two abbeys were founded. The city has come a long way since then and now boasts a thriving tourist industry, partly thanks to the large number of mediaeval buildings still standing today.

Belgium is, of course, famed for its chocolate, its chips and its beer so we'll be endeavouring to verify that these claims to fame are justified during our stay. We'll also be giving two concerts, showcasing the finest in Berkshire music-making to the good people of Belgium, hopefully in some really exciting locations...more on this soon!

Next up...but how do we get there...and where should we stay...?!

It all starts here...

Hello, and welcome to the Woodley Concert Band on Tour blog. So...what's it all about?

Well, Woodley Concert Band is a wind band based, as you may have guessed, in Woodley near Reading. In 2008, we ventured forth on an epic journey, all the way to exotic Eastbourne in order to give a concert on their rather lovely bandstand.

We had rather a good time so during the summer of 2009, we decided that it was time to expand our horizons and give even more people the opportunity to experience Woodley Concert Band live in person. Accordingly, without further ado (well, much further ado anyway), I was volunteered to be in charge and the planning was underway.

This blog is intended to keep both band members and WCB fans up to date with all that's going on with the tour as it gets closer so that you can see what we've got lined up (and what's not quite been sorted out yet!). Over the next few posts, I'll be bringing you up to date with how things have shaped up since the planning started and then it'll be full steam ahead until May 2010 when we set out on our adventure!