Country Roads, Flying Carpets, Freezing winds, and…bugs

Curtis Tweedie and Dan Willows

On the road with the cast of ‘Wired’ Notes from Stage Manager, Susan Miyagishima

We’re now halfway through the 5th week of our Ontario tour. We’ve had an amazing time traveling all around the province, but it wouldn’t be a TYA tour without a few bumps along the way. After our first week in Toronto we traveled out to Barrie for 5 days. Unfortunately, our hotel left quite a bit to be desired. After two days there, we started to notice itchy bug bites on our bodies. Yep, it turns out that there were bed bugs afoot! We promptly changed hotels and found ourselves happily situated in a much nicer hotel for the remainder of our time where we could relax, decontaminate, and let our bites heal for the weekend.

Jennica Grienke

During the third week of our Ontario tour, we returned to Toronto where we spent an evening enjoying a great night of musical theatre at Disney’s Aladdin. Even a group of theatre professionals such as us can’t figure out how they got the magic carpet to actually fly around the stage! Later in the week, we hit the road again to Belleville. One day we took a wrong turn and ended up driving around some rugged and winding country roads to find our way back. Thank goodness for GPS. The fourth week of our tour started off still in Belleville, but we soon headed out again for a two week stint up North. We started in North Bay for a couple days and then made our way to Blind River, Sault Ste. Marie, and finally ended our week in Little Current on Manatoulin Island. Winter certainly fell upon us up north and we’ve had to brave quite a bit of snow and freezing winds. Our weekend in Little Current saw -20 temperatures with the wind chill. It’s such a lovely area though. We’d love to visit again, perhaps in the Spring or Summer, when it doesn’t feel like our faces might freeze off. We are now in the fifth week of our Ontario tour. We’ve made our way to the Sudbury area where we’ve enjoyed two shows in a beautiful theatre at the Sudbury Secondary School. Such a treat to be back in a theatre for a change with full stage lighting, dressing rooms, wings, etc.

Only problem was when the van got stuck in the snow as it was backing up to the loading bay doors. Luckily there were lots of hands on deck to push the van free. The rest of this week will see lots of travel with us in a different town every night. We did get to make a fun tourist stop to the “Big Nickel” in Sudbury before heading out of town though. We’re certainly looking forward to heading back to Toronto at the end of the week and settling in to one hotel for our final week in Ontario. We can’t believe that our time here is almost over. What an adventure it has been!