No Shit there I was...
That was basically the theme for my last week while I was at Great Western War. I left Wednesday after massage class to head to the outside of Bakersfield to a town called Taft. Which kind of confused me at first since Charles works for Taft Law School. I managed to find it without getting lost. Which that in itself is a miracle (Stop snickering Charles, I can hear it from here). I ran into some road construction traffic outside of the 221 exit on the I-5. I found the place eventually. And then no body at camp would answer their phones so I parked my car at the event parking lot 1 up by the gate and shoved everything I thought I'd need in my white laundry/ruck/mail sack thing that I acquired a few years ago, strapped my sword to my side over my awesome wool great coat and hoofed it in the general direction I knew camp to be. I stopped about a third of the way there to see if I could get a hold of anyone to find out where in the bloody hell camp was when a very nice guy was walking past asked if he could help me find camp, I asked if he knew where Dragon Fang was camping. He said no but offered to carried my bag for me while we went looking for it. About half way there, I heard the drums. Our camp is nortorious for drums so hearing them was a good clue. I told the guy that I thought that might be my camp and we started walking in that general direction. The closer we got the more and more those drums started to sound familiar. So in the end, I found my camp by echolocation. I thanked the guy for walking me and he went back to his camp. Once I finally got my stuffed dumped I said my hellos to everyone and got a tankard of Thunder Punch and walked around talking to everyone I knew, catching up on everything that had happened since I had last seen them in May. We had 63 people in our encampment and it managed to never feel big or crowded.
The next day, after being rudely awakened by the Herald crying the morning news at 8am, I had a cup of tea to warm up and some breakfast. We, the camp, had a little flying visitor in the form of a bat that had fallen out of a tree and landed on the shirt of one of the girls that were sitting under it.
She put it back in the tree once we all got pictures and ooo'd and ahhh'd over it where it went back to sleep. Unfortunately it died the next day. The most that we were able to guess was that it had had some bad hunting and had starved since we couldn't see anything physically wrong with it. Drum circle was quiet that night and what dancers we had ended up going over to a different more lively camp and our camp basically all went to bed early. I did manage to get a cool picture of the sunset over part of the lake that we were camped next to.
Friday was quiet too although Chris and Korrene showed up that night for the weekend. It was nice seeing them again. Drum circle was more lively than it was Thursday night but soon it too died early and drummers and dancers went elsewhere. I walked around Merchants Row for a while, looked at some shinies, finally found the size daggers I've been looking for for a project I've had in mind for a while now. Found a couple of cool pendants that I will soon be using on new necklaces. Got to play big scary bitch with a sword for the kids in the camp when they wanted to walk around without their parents around. Fortunately they were mostly well behaved so I didn't have to threaten them within inches of their lives. That was mostly all weekend, but since their parents were happy to take them around, I didn't have to play escort too often. Man, kids can be soooo annoying.
Saturday was when the party finally picked up. I had some Thunder punch (It tastes and goes down like cool aid but it will knock you on your ass if you aren't careful), and I volunteered for gate duty since I was bored and nothing else to do. Gate duty is making sure that no one who enters is A) underage, B) armed, at least the men. Women were allowed to keep bodice daggers, and C) that they made sure they picked up any surrendered weapons on their way out. It was fun. Drum circle lasted pretty much all night. I would guess it was around 2 or 3 am before things finally started to quiet down, and didn't actually die until almost 5. I really need to make a sign that says Heralds will be executed for once again, just like every other day this weekend, I was rudely awakened at 8am with the morning news on Sunday morning.
Sunday morning started out, once the herald had shut up and moved on, with a hot shower and crappy water pressure. Then there was shanai practice where everyone took turns beating on everyone else. I ended up getting hit hard enough to be bruised on the inside of my thigh and on my stomach. The day was pretty quiet and relaxing, it was pretty much nurse a hangover day. Except for the few of us who didn't drink to get drunk. There was steak for dinner. I headed home around 8pm.
All in all, it was a good weekend. I got to hang out with and get to know people that I had seen around before and never had much of a chance to talk to. I had a lot of fun and I can't wait until the next event.