[at-l] Another Trail Days come and gone . . .

[redhead at hack.net (redhead@xxxxxxxx)]

and it is now back to the so called "real" world :)

I only saw one of the weddings, but it was pretty awesome. The bride, Murphy, 
was wearing a stunning wedding dress - with hiking boots, of course. And the 
groom had a handsome tuxedo . . . well, the top of one, anyway - the bottom 
half of the outfit was hiking shorts and sandles. The nice gentelman who 
married them was wearing a nice suit - yea, the top part. His bottom outfit was
also hiker style, with hiking boots instead of sandles. A wonderful reception 
followed, with neverending food (a hard feat to manage around hikers!) and lots
of laughter and friendship.

The parade was, as usual, a blast - a blast of water, that is! There is an 
official reward for the identification of the person who dumped the 5 gallon 
bucket of water on Leapfrog and Cassy ;) Most people were heavily armed with 
machine-gun style water guns or ballons.  

I'd like to say the talent show was great - but unfortunately for the first 
time it was scheduled Sunday well after lunch time, and Damascus was down to 
about a quarter of the people who were there on Saturday. It was so short that 
I was 45 minutes late and missed it. 

I saw about 20 listers, although most of them for very brief periods. 
(Hummingbird, Shannon and I tried to find you, but it was a futile effort :( )

This year they actually enforced the "campground camping only" policy,
which had both pluses and minuses. We were told by a reliable source that they 
actually put that decision out as a survey to the locals, and 90% of the town 
people wanted to keep everyone in town on the river and other places. I guess 
the 10% who didn't want to keep it that way had a tad more say in the matter?

The good part, of course, was having everyone tenting close by. One of the 
minuses was once you actually got to the campground, some strange vortex set in
and it was hard to get motivated enough to either walk to town or find a ride. 
Of course, the vortex was strongest in Billville, although I hear it was pretty
strong in other places, too, like Hobo Central, or some of the Billville 
suburbs, like Janet Land and FannyPack Land. ;)


Anyway - the rest of the weekend was the same as every Trail Days before - full
of laughter, fun, campfires, drum circles, great friends, constantly seeing 
someone else you haven't seen in forever and wanted to hug, and the mixed 
feelings of happiness and sadness when Sunday and leaving time arrived. There 
is really no need to elaborate on the rest of the details - I think Chomps pics

sum up how the rest of the weekend was.

btw, Chomp, I can't believe you took so long to upload those photo's ;-)

Red