My Riverfest Elora

There is something incredible about  standing in a crowd of strangers, feet planted in a familiar place, with  live music so loud you can’t hear your own thoughts trying to invade  your happy place.

It’s that magic moment when you forget your inhibitions and you just go with the music.

That’s my Riverfest Elora experience.

It  couldn’t have come at a better time either. The Carpenter and I haven’t  had a vacation together all summer. Riverfest was our family’s  stay-cation. Mind you, it was work too. I covered the event as a  reporter, while the Carpenter volunteered his skills for the event. Work  should always be this much fun.

It was exactly what we needed as a  couple, to just kick back and cut loose. In a crowd of thousands, we  always seem to find a piece of each other we forget to see in the  everyday routine; that spark of fun, that youthful silliness that gets  bogged down by life stuff.

For us, live music is the pilot light  of a relationship that started in a simpler time, when rock concerts and  a gypsy attitude made us weekend warriors.  That was in the TBK (time  before kids). I don’t miss those times, because things change for good  reason.

But Riverfest Elora gave us a venue to fire up the pilot  light and get a little crazy (and by crazy I mean the Carpenter enjoyed  sampling the beer tent offerings, while I drank lemonade - but hey, I  was working).

To his credit, the beer helped inspire the  Carpenter’s outstanding and previously unseen dance moves when the fever  of The Planet Smashers infected him enough that he braved the dance  floor with me (and by dance floor I mean the hockey pad where he taught  our son to skate). One of my spouse’s best qualities is that he truly  doesn’t care what anyone thinks, and he danced like nobody was  watching.  I don’t care what anybody says, that is seriously sexy.

But  perhaps the best part of this year’s event was seeing that very same  love of live music passed down to my kids, who are no longer kids but  amazing music-loving adolescents on the verge of independence, and who  are just beginning to realize that their mom is truly the coolest of  their parental unit (cough).

Flanked by my son, who is now eye to  eye with me at 13 years of attitude, and my smaller but entirely grown  up 15-year-old daughter, we ran to the front of the stage for the Sam  Roberts Band and, though they will deny it, they sang along and danced  with me. Yep, that’s right. I got every member of my family to cut loose  and dance at some point last weekend.

When the band Metric took  the stage on Saturday night, I stood back and watched from the sidelines  as thousands moved with the music and knew that somewhere in the thick  of it were my kids, with their own tribe of friends, confident and  cutting lose in their own way. How cool is that?

And so it begins: the next generation of music fans, inspired.

There are moments when you connect and let go at the same time, and for three days on home soil, that’s what my family did.

That was our Riverfest Elora.