Cradled by a series of mountain ranges and hills, Amherst sits in western Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley. Known mainly for its educational offerings, the town is home to the state's flagship public university, University of Massachusetts or UMass as its known locally. The college students infuse a healthy dose of youthful vigour and allow the town to have a number of urban amenities in a relatively rural setting. It was in this very university that we performed our short engagement in Amherst. Though time was limited, we managed to make it to the movies to catch the new Shrek 3, a very amusing night's entertainment. The movie theatre had a great advertisement for the Simpson's Movie. We couldn't resist hopping on board!

Claire Mc Cole on the set of the New Simpson's movie!

Though fairly small, Amherst is home to the intimate world of one of America's best loved poet's, Emily Dickinson. During her lifetime, she wrote nearly 2,000 poems. The world that inspired her to write about life, love and death was a small one, her house where she was born and raised. The poet spent most of her life in this brick style home built in the early 19th century, that is located today on Main St. Amherst. It was here that she worked on her verse that made her so internationally known.

Emily Dickinson's Homestead

In following on from some previous diaries earlier in the year, I am going to include some more backstage photos this week. This time pictures include lead singer Hayley Griffiths preparing for her sound check and Parker Hall, tap dancer, getting ready for his sound check with Assistant Stage Manager Laura Minogue. Sound checks are very important in live stage performance, as the right pitch and audio level needs to be achieved for each performance.

From Amherst we headed south to Newport News, Virginia which was to be the Boyne's very first engagement at the Ferguson Centre for the Performing Arts. New port News is just north of the famous Naval Base of Norfolk and South of the equally famous Colonial Williamsburg. Again time was limited on our very hot and humid visit to Virginia. Temperatures were soaring high into the nineties! We took a day trip to Williamsburg where we spent the day at the Busch Gardens Europe theme park and downtown Colonial Williamsburg. Once said to have been one of the original capitals of America, the area is soaked in history. We observed and participated in 18th-century life at the reconstructed historic village where costumed actors come very close to convincing you that you've travelled back in time. This town certainly brought history to life. Queen Elizabeth II recently returned to Virginia's 18th-century colonial capital in May 2007, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in Williamsburg.

Colonial Williamsburg

No day could be complete without some fun time and so we headed to Busch Gardens. The park is simply stunning with some of the world's best rollercoaster's and theme park shows. Earlier in the tour, when the company was in Florida, we visited Busch Gardens Tampa which was African themed. In Virginia, Busch Gardens is European themed. The park is divided into 6 countries and happily one of those countries is Ireland! Killarney Village is really pretty and features everything from Leprechauns and Irish stew to Musicians and dancing.

Entering Ireland in Busch Gardens!

The highlight of our day was a VIP trip on their new rollercoaster Griffon, the worlds tallest floorless dive coaster with a 205 ft, 90 degree straight drop.scary! Being in Riverdance certainly helped this day, we skipped a 2 hour queue!

The new Griffon rollercoaster

We finished our busy weekend off with dinner and some drinks in the local bars and here's looking forward to a nice relaxing week in Hamilton, Canada!

Jason, Parker, Natia, Zeph and Garrett posing for the camera!