150th SF Caledonian Scottish Games @ Pleasanton, CA

[OC Richard]

Nice pics! I'm looking rather grumpy there at Massed Bands. Actually I'm feeling the effects of several Black & Blues.

I'm a huge Game Of Thrones fan and it was awesome seeing The Mountain. That guy is huge! And he posed for a load of pics and signed autographs and so forth, very nice.

Our band had a good run on Saturday, got 1st place, here we are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6JbvuiHbnA

Not as good a view here, for one thing it's a wiggly camera, for another my backside is front-and-centre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3FeEwJtWZo

[sailortats]

@ OC Richard
I tried a couple of times to catch up with you but you were never at the band site. Best weather in years on Saturday, not too hot and a nice little breeze.

[OC Richard]

sorry about that, Tats!

[grizzbass]

wish I could have been there. especially hafthor. I shot world's strongest man in 2014 and he was great for the camera

[Alan H]

I was stubborn and did not get a picture with Hafthor.

However, I DID get to meet the absolute legend of Highland Athletics, Bill Anderson. If I had to pick heroes, I'd pick Bill over Hafthor, any day. But I'm weird, like that.

[OC Richard]

Here are a few pics I took.

I arrived at the host hotel San Ramon Marriott on Friday afternoon (after having great Indian food at Haveli in Dublin) to find none other than Greater Glasgow Police doing some run-throughs of their competition sets in the car park



Due to the recent vast increase in the size of Grade One bands (top bands having 25-30 pipers, a dozen snares, and a half-dozen tenors, around fifty members in all) and the current strength of the US dollar it became impossible for the Games to pay sufficient travel money to overseas bands. So the Games came up with a nice solution: limit the size of the Grade One bands to 15 players.

The participating bands were Greater Glasgow Police, Triumph Street (from British Columbia) and our local Los Angeles Scottish. BTW the former band was known for decades as The City Of Glasgow Police until a reorganisation of Scottish police caused their name to change to Strathclyde Police. A recent reorganisation has led to the latest name change, Police Scotland Greater Glasgow. In Grade One there is also a band called Police Scotland Fife.

Friday afternoon at the Marriott is always the Professional solo piping competition, held in a ballroom with great acoustics. Anyone who likes piping, or would like to expose themselves to great piping in a great setting, owes it to themselves to attend.

Saturday morning, the rest of the solos begin. What's a Highland Games without a huge plastic cow?



In the late morning and early afternoon the bands were getting out their instruments, pipe sections getting some air in the pipes, drum corps running through their sets. Here's Winnipeg Police pipers doing an initial tune-up



Here's the drum corps of Queen City Pipe Band (Denver CO) practicing. Their kit was very nice, not the usual modern pipe band thing, with weathered/reproduction kilts, Lovat tweed waistcoats, and Lovat hose. Oddly their Lovat tweed waistcoats had brilliant Royal Blue satin backs (much brighter than appears in this photo).



Perennial favourites at these Games are San Francisco's finest, the Prince Charles Pipe Band, in their Black Stewart kilts. A very fine band, they won Grade Two both days. Not affected by the Grade One size limit, they played 14 pipers, which has long sounded "right" to pipe band people, being the size of military pipe bands for many years.



The final bands of the day were the Grade Ones. Here is Greater Glasgow Police, which opted to play three snares and three tenors rather than four snares and two tenors. Modern Grade One pipe bands, with six or more tenors tuned to various notes, have sophisticated drum orchestrations which just aren't possible to do with two or three tenors. Likewise the lush three and four part harmonies of the vast 25-30 member pipe corps aren't going to sound the same with eight pipers.



Winnipeg Police marching out of the circle after competing. Their competition day is done; time for refreshments!



Apropos of nothing, doing quick math I estimate that the god Thor was 13 1/2 feet tall and weighed just shy of 800 pounds.