You can celebrate this St. Patrick’s Day with two popular local musicians who travelled the world collecting friends, experiences, and more than one great story.
On March 17, Chad Winger and Daniel Booth from Lac La Biche will be rocking out at Labone’s Sports Pub with their acoustic covers – something the duo used to do regularly before they left town to do a worldwide tour. Winger and Booth, both 27, left Lac La Biche in April of 2010, armed with a guitar and bongos respectively.
The duo landed in London, with sights set on European adventure. With instruments in hand, they toured the classic destinations: London, Paris, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Bruges, Burgundy, Barcelona, Ibiza, Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Munich, Prague – and that was just the start.
But wherever they went, no matter if the locals were saying bonjour or ciao, Winger and Booth made friends through the universal language of music.
“Our big thing was if a hostel had a roof – then it was ours,” Winger said. “I’d start playing the guitar and Daniel had his bongos. Pretty soon, people would bring drinks and gather around. Basically, we had a big party wherever we went.”
Winger remembers playing on the staircase of an ancient church in Paris, overlooking the famous city at night. Soon they had people joining in by freestyle rapping in French.
“Everyone gets music,” he said. “And we found that it doesn’t matter if people barely spoke a word of English – everyone knows the words to Wonderwall and Bob Marley.”
After a few months in Europe, Winger and Booth were full on experiences but short on cash. So Winger winged it to Australia to look for work and Booth headed back home to Canada. Now travelling solo, Winger landed in Sydney and soon landed a job that showed he was a world away from Lac La Biche – he spent a month packing bikinis into boxes in a warehouse.
He padded his travel funds further by doing some landscaping work before scoring a poolside bartending job on the picturesque west coast, near Margaret River. He spent the next three months in paradise-like settings, living a stone’s throw away from the beach and a perfect blue bay where whales would swim by daily.
But itchy feet sent Winger back on the road, and he piled in a car with new friends and drove to the other end of Australia to spend time in Brisbane and Byron Bay. After rattling around the country for a couple months – driving around the continent’s whole coast and shaking hands with rappers Flava Flav and Chuck D at a music festival – Winger found himself back bartending at the same west coast-resort.
And that’s when he did something his father warned him against – sort of.
“I met a girl from Estonia,” Winger said. “My dad told me: “don’t fall in love with an Australian girl” because the logistics would be ridiculous.”
After travelling with his new girlfriend, even taking a “vacation from their vacation” by visiting Bali and the Gili Islands, Winger found himself headed to a country he hadn’t remotely planned to visit when he first planned his trip: Estonia.
“I didn’t even know where Estonia was,” he said laughing.
On Sept. 14 of last year, they landed in Estonia (which is located south of Finland across the Baltic Sea, and bordered by Latvia in the south and Russia to the east).
“It’s a really old-fashioned country, very classic European,” Winger explained. “Everything is extremely small – small cars and small homes. It makes Alberta feel gigantic.”
After spending some time in his girlfriend’s (small) family home and visiting the country, Winger’s trip took an unfortunate turn. After a night out on the town with friends, he slipped on some wet concrete and fractured his skull on the pavement. The accident sent him to the intensive care unit.
“The last thing I remember was playing pool,” Winger said. “And then I woke up in the hospital.”
Shortly after, he returned back home to Canada where doctors told him he didn’t suffer any permanent damage – except for not being able to drink alcohol for a year. But Winger doesn’t focus on the split second where his head met the concrete – instead he thinks about the 19 months where he met countless friends and his new girlfriend.
“It was a huge life experience,” he said. “Every day was an adventure, it wasn’t like a vacation – it was my life.”
If the travels of the two men make you green with envy, then head down to Labone’s Sports Pub March 17, where Winger and Booth hit the stage at 9 p.m.
