A few weekends ago I was given the opportunity to attend the Northeastern Instrumental Music Festival in Lake George. It’s a yearly festival offered to the top musicians from the Northeast. This annual festival dates back all the way to 1969! It supports the idea of pursuing music and having it be a lifelong experience. Our director this year was Patrick Beauregard, who has previously directed here. He comes from Bethlehem Central Schools and has conducted at the NEIMF for 2 previous years. I was selected to go this year, along with Sarah T, Lexi H, and Emma J. We stayed for 4 days and 3 nights, and the concert was on the last day. We stayed in the Marriott Hotel and had our practices there as well. When we arrived, we had auditions to get our chair seatings. The chair seatings determine what part you get to play. I ended up being chair 3 and played part 1. Since we didn’t get the music ahead of time, we had to practice for many hours a day. It was tough work, but we all pulled it off in the end and had an amazing concert Sunday afternoon. I was really impressed with how friendly everyone was. They had taken kids from all over the Northeast and we all had come together to pull off the concert and have our music sound amazing. We ended up making friends with our room neighbors and we had a blast with them. It was just so nice to see other people being so nice when none of us had met anyone besides the people in our schools. Since our hotel was right downtown in Lake George, a lot of things were very close by. We ended up taking a trip to a small Price Chopper that was behind our hotel. We also ended up going bowling and laser tag since it was so close by and we were given free time after all the hard work we did. We went with our neighbors and had a blast. No pun intended. The entire weekend was such a fun experience and I hope to go back next year! A lot of the people I made friends with were seniors and I’m really going to miss never seeing them again, but I’m glad I met them and got to play with them. I’d like to give a special thanks to Mr. Barrow for taking time out of his weekend to take us to Lake George, for allowing us this opportunity, and for putting up with our antics the whole weekend. I really appreciate all he does for us.