Today started off earlier than usual. We all had to be in the massed ringing hall by 8am to be ready to rehearse our solo piece that we’d be playing tonight at the final concert. While our rehearsal slot began at 8:20am, we had to make sure we had our spots ready so at exactly 8:20 we could begin to play. We also only had 10 minutes before the next group got to go, so we had to make the most of the little time provided to us. Using this time to the fullest is also important because this would be all the time we got to play before we had to do it for the solo concert in the evening.

After our early rehearsal we had a half an hour break before the rest of the day began. We started with Bound for South Australia, which most certainly wakes you up! We continued for a couple hours playing the pieces in reverse concert order until we jumped to The Prayer, which is what starts the concert, for our final song before lunch so that we could finish the day having rehearsed every piece in order.

After lunch we resumed our practice. We practiced a few songs and then an announcement was made. In this announcement we were told that the two pieces selected for sight reading were being added to the concert. The two songs are Sweet Caroline and a medley from Mary Poppins. This not only added two more songs to the 9 we had, but it made us realize that we had to actually try to figure out these pieces, in less than two days. After that announcement we continued with playing all the pieces in reverse concert order.

After we finished going in reverse order we played through Sweet Caroline and worked out issues. We went on our way to dinner which was Mince & Root Vegetable Casserole or Chicken Katsu, with fruit and apple crumble. Once we finished dinner we went back to the hotel to change into concert dress, and then went back over to perform at the solo concert. We were the 5th in an order of 10 groups. The concert went great and then we slowly made our way back to the hotel and got a lot of compliments for how great we played.

-Crawford and Sam