This past weekend my husband I went up to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York for a long weekend. It began what I’m calling my week of Jason Isbell, in which I see him in concert 3 times in one week in 3 different states. I had already bought tickets to see him at Wolf Trap in Virginia which is one of my favorite venues when it was announced he was going to co-headline two shows with my other favorite artist Brandi Carlile. How could I not go to that? So I asked my husband if he preferred to go to Canandaigua, NY or to Portland, ME. He choose Canandaigua and because he’s awesome didn’t even question me. The third and final show will be at our annual trip to the Newport Folk Festival next weekend as he was announced as the Friday night headliner long after I had bought either of these tickets.

We drove up on Friday and arrived in Canandaigua in just about enough time to grab an early dinner before heading to the concert. Brandi Carlile was up first. It turns out I’m very glad that my husband chose Canandaigua over Portland because I compared the setlists and we got an entirely different set than what has been her more standard setlist that she’s been playing on this tour and I’ve seen multiple times already. For whatever reason instead of having the whole backing band plus the string quartet that they’ve been traveling with on this tour, it was just Brandi and the Twins up there playing acoustic guitars. I’ve seen them do that before, but it’s always awesome. They still played a decent amount of stuff from the new album, but not the whole thing like they have been doing. It was interesting to see how they filled in the string parts with the piano. They also played some different older stuff than they’ve been playing at other recent shows I’ve been to. I’m sort of curious what the actual written setlist was because there was a couple of times she said she was making a decision to change and play something not on the set list. One of those times was probably my favorite parts of the evening in which they did a sing-a-long medley of John Denver songs, “Country Roads”, “Sunshine on My Shoulder”, and “Rocky Mountain High”. It was glorious.

Having also seen Jason Isbell twice since he’s been traveling around touring his most recent record over the past year I wasn’t sure different this set list would be either. It was of course a lot the same, but he definitely mixed it up on the older stuff. He of course played a lot of stuff from the new album, plus the same three songs that he seems to be playing from the Something More than Free album, which are probably my three favorite so I won’t complain. He mixed it up a bit more with stuff from Southeastern and before. I’ll be curious to see what if anything differs in the next two times I see him this week.

I’d never been to the Finger Lakes region before so I decided we should stick around and explore a little bit instead of heading home first thing on Saturday. We drove down Seneca Lake and stopped in a little park and stuck our feet in. Our ultimate destination was Corning. I wanted to go to the Corning Museum of Glass. It was a cool museum, though I wished they had more about the actual history of Corning glass itself. All the art, innovation, and other history exhibits were cool though. They also have live demonstrations so we got to see some glass blowing as well. I was very interested in the fact that there seemed to be a high Chinese tourist population that goes to the museum given that the demonstration had a Mandarin interpreter and the signs in the museum cafe had Chinese translations on them. I was terrified of the gift shop. I was so afraid I was going to knock into all the glass displays and break everything. I managed to snag a Christmas ornament and get out without breaking anything.

The Corning Museum of Glass had a joint ticket with the Rockwell Museum. I didn’t really look into what the Rockwell Museum was. I just wrongly assumed that it was a museum of Norman Rockwell’s works. Turns out it’s actually a museum based off of a collection of American art started by a family with the last name Rockwell. I’m not sorry we went. It just wasn’t what I thought I was going to.

Despite the forecast when I packed on Friday morning saying it was going to be sunny and in the low-80s every day while we were there, the weather completely changed while we were inside the glass museum. It go much colder in the mid-60s and started raining. I would have packed much differently had I known. The weather kind of put a damper on my desire to do much else. We did walk up and down Market Street in downtwon Corning, but didn’t look into doing anything else that day or Sunday before we left because the weather was so gross and most of what there would be to do would be outside.

We ate dinner at a place on Market Street called Sorge’s, which is an old school Italian restaurant, and it was delicious. It was probably the best Italian food I have eaten in a long time. I liked they had sort of build your own pasta plates in which you could choose your pasta from a few options, which you could add additional toppings to. I got spaghetti and added meatballs, mushrooms, and threw some melted mozzarella cheese on top for good measure. I was very pleased with my decision.

We headed back to Maryland after breakfast on Sunday early enough that we were able to swing by a friend’s 40th birthday party before going home so even though the weather put a damper on our New York activities it worked out so we could celebrate with a friend.