Work has been kicking my butt since my last post here. I’m in accounting and our fiscal year end is March 31st. On top of that we implemented a new system which went live on April 1st. On top of that, we are changing our auditors who aer doing a full three year audit on top of our outgoing auditors auditing the current fiscal year end. On top of that… All these things have added up to extraordinarily long hours, some nights working until midnight 
. Long story short, I have not been able to practice or play as much as I would like. I did learn one song and posted a video of it here..
Thanks to the fact that I have a great boss and a great team that works for me, we were able to escape the week before last for my wife’s “get the heck out of town” for her 60th birthday. We went to the gulf coast of Mississippi and spent her actual birthday in New Orleans for a beignet tour and visiting the French Quarter. Other parts of the trip included lunch at The Shed Barbecue and Blues Joint where we had great ribs and listened to a guy playing steel resonator for a couple hours. He was very enjoyable to listen to and began an itch to get a resonator.
We chose our route for the drive home to follow the Mississippi Blues Trail where we made multiple stops over three days.
First stop was Indianola, MS and the B.B. King Museum. This is a wonderful tribute to the King of the Blues and very educational. I boggles my mind the struggles he and fellow musicians, not to mention many others, had to endure in a segregated society, The hardships they overcame to rise to the top is amazing.
After getting seeing a few other sites such as Club Ebony and grabbing dinner, we made the drive to Clarksdale, MS. That evening we went to Ground Zero Blues Club which is owned by Morgan Freeman. A house band played the first part of the evening which was then followed by an open jam with the hose band. At one point, the band asked each table where they were from. I mistakenly thought we would have be among those who had travelled the farthest until the first table said they came from the Netherlands. The next table came from the UK, then a table from Austria, then… You Europeans sure do love the Blues 
. At the end of the night, we met Ron from the west coast of the US who was in town for a Blues guitar clinic. He was the last to play that evening and asked if we would take his picture in front of the club.
The next day we toured the Delta Blues Museum. This was another educational day with lots of very cool exhibits. Among many of the cool things is a guitar that Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top had made from the wood of a cabin in which Muddy Waters lived. The museum is also instructional and has a band of its students. We bought a CD of the band which included a very young, maybe 13 - 15 year old, Christone Kingfish Ingram. Oh, and we met a family who came from Germany. And of course, we had to make a stop at the Crossroads.
From there we made the drive to Memphis, TN and a stop at Sun Studio where Elvis, among many others, was discovered. Among the magic that was made in that studio was a few songs from U2’s Rattle & Hum album which included “When Love Comes to Town” with B.B. King. Turns out they left the drum set behind. My wife’s favorite band is U2 so she was on cloud nine when she got to sit at Larry Mullins Jr’s drum set.
We then spent some time at the Blues Hall of Fame for more Blues immersion and education. Such a cool place. As we were leaving, a gentleman asked one of the employees if he could speak about B.B. King. He was from Germany and is working on a story about B.B. King and the Blues. You Europeans sure do love the Blues 
This was such an amazing trip. All the music and especially the resonators gave me a bad, bad case of GAS which led me to buying this Gretsch G9200 Boxcar Resonator
I don’t know when @JustinGuitar has another guitar camp/clinic planned for North America, but I highly recommend holding one in Clarksdale, MS. It has such a rich history of the Blues and after seeing so many Europeans there and meeting Ron who was there for a guitar clinic, it seems like such a natural place for Justin to have one of his in person clinics. The clinic Ron attended as at Shack Up In
Sorry for the novel, but as you can tell, it was an amazing trip.