Castle Valley Academy

By Jada and Michael
Every year, the school’s music program hosts a tour in different areas around the country. This year, the tour mostly focused on California, although we started with several concerts in Utah.

We started our tour on Wednesday, December 6, 2023 in West Jordan, about 4 hours away from our school.

Then, after several more concerts in the Greater Salt Lake area, we continued on to Northern California. We performed at Granite Bay Seventh-day Adventist church in Granite Bay, California. At first, we were all very nervous because the church was so large, but the concert went very well and we had a lot of fun there. We also met Doug Batchelor and we took a group photo.
The concert was live streamed on YouTube and you can watch it HERE!

For a student’s birthday, we went to the Riverside Pier and had dinner at Olive Garden, which everyone was very happy about. We had a stop off at the very small Yucca Valley Seventh-day Adventist church, but the crowd was large. They had invited many people from their community to come to our Christmas Concert and they sure did!

In the middle of our tour, we went to Fresno Central SDA Church. By this time, many of the students were sick. We felt like we hadn’t sung our best, but the church was so grateful that we had come and invited us to come back next year. Pastor Stephen Bohr was there and we got to see him in person, which was pretty cool.

At Hesperia, CA, we celebrated Jada’s birthday and had fruit parfaits for breakfast. Hesperia was also the home of one of our students who was very glad to see his mom.

The last sabbath of our tour, we performed for the church service at Needles Seventh-day Adventist Church in Needles, CA. The Needles concert was homecoming for a number
of our students, including one of our seniors, Jada, and the church was packed.
The last concert of the tour was held in nearby Lake Havasu City, AZ. We performed on the open air stage under the London Bridge itself surrounded by Christmas lights and tourists wandering by. A hundred or so people stopped to watch the concert and there were probably another couple hundred that heard from shops close by.

In a little under two weeks, we performed 12 times in three different states.