And an excellent time was had by all.
Oh. Wait. If you're reading this node, you probably want more info than that.
First off, much thanks is owed to czeano for providing the site and taking care of logistics, panamaus for coordinating food, all those who aided in the cooking (Becca comes to mind, but there were others as well), and pretty much everybody who helped out over the course of the weekend. Without you guys, we'd all have been stranded somewhere off the Blue Ridge Parkway, without direction or food, slowly wasting away from hunger until the Park Police came to find us and haul us all away for C!ing a bridge.
Well, maybe not. But thank you anyway.
A log of the weekend's activities, from my perspective:
- Friday
- loaded up truck in Richmond, drove to Blacksburg, unloaded truck at my townhouse, drove to Sparta, NC
- after some nervous driving up and down the street, parked on an incline. The wisdom of this would appear much more questionable once the sun rose again, but for the moment seemed okay.
- arrived, to find Texas crowd already there, as well as some Ohio noders, Void_Ptr e marito, and several others. Was greeted with "Hokies suck!" by brassmule; apparently his car saw a lot of obviously Virginia Tech-affiliated cars on his way down. This was understandable, as I was far from the only Hokie returning home that day.
- commiserated with Kit Lo about problems getting women. He reminds me of a friend of mine, except about 3 times as bad.
- marveled at kenata's amazing volume of negative-rep nodes
- greeted qeyser and traded a cappella notes; my group sang with his group in March 2000, and we (along with czeano, Jurph and gf, cerulean, and maybe 8ldj too?) had therefore partied together at Dongtar as well. Most of these former MNs and Dongtar partiers were to arrive the next day.
- finally crashed out at about 2 AM. Many others decided they could sleep when they're dead and got maybe an hour, max.
Saturday
- woke up, consumed breakfast, went outside to notice that my truck was not in such a safe place after all -- the sideways slope of the hill was seriously worrying me. Fortunately, czeano found that his neighbors would not be in this weekend, and thus their driveway was open for parking.
- watched the opening of a monstrous ostrich egg. The size and necessary effort must be seen to be believed.
- witnessed the arrival of WonkoDSane, karmaflux, Tera (kfx's GF), and Sunday Girl. SG almost immediately found a couch, identified it as hers, and spent two-thirds of her weekend on said couch. Sometimes I wish I was a dog.
- the afternoon's potential activities: canoeing, hiking, or sitting around. I chose option 3.
- Ohio noder set #2 arrived, bringing Jurph and gf, cerulean and a co-worker of Jurph. Jurph began making transliterated nametags in the Cyrillic alphabet for many present; the most involved had to be that of jaubertmoniker. Renewed acquaintances with the MNs who might have met me; for the non-MNs who might not have, a quick hint at my lacrosse monologue from the T'ph/MN show refreshed memories. Text available upon request. The blue drink also arrived with this group.
- While waiting for the ribs to cook, feasted on mean cookies upon the arrival of Becca and Zaph.
- Charles Vergos Rendezvous pork ribs for dinner. Mmmmmmm. Meanwhile, I was getting considerably less than sober.
- C!ing the bridge -- see the pictures as they become available. There were also many experiments with the resonance of the tunnel; it was determined that a low G was on the resonant frequency. Attempts were made to sing, but nobody had any music. We got maybe 2-3 pages into the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah before people's knowledge tapered off and the mostly-male group got tired of the tenor and bass-dominated sound.
- Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure and the Rocky Horror Picture Show were shown upon return from the tunnel; both were considerably enhanced by the drunkenness and Xylene inhalation that had taken place immediately prior. Meanwhile, sing-alongs were happening on the porch.
- "The bad thing has happened" -- czeano informed us that the water had run out. Later, this was found not to be the case, but the assembled noderage was somewhat worried for a while.
Sunday
- Awoke to the smell of Becca's mean pancakes. Tasty.
- Watched a PBS video entitled The Natural History of the Chicken. The director must be one sick, sick man, but there's no way he's as sick as some of the people in this documentary.
- The State was watched immediately afterwards.
- Groups wandered down to the bridge to admire their handiwork, most in a less-drunken state than the previous night. After a while, the whole group headed down for pictures; qeyser attempted to scale the tunnel wall, but failed; eventually, it was determined that the best way to the Parkway was through the roughage. Pictures were taken, though many complained about having to stare directly into the sun to look at the camera.
- The exodus begins; I left probably an hour later, having fought yet another battle to get my truck out of the neighbors' driveway (since I wasn't bright enough to just back out the way I came... nooooo). Returned to Blacksburg about 5 PM, after stopping at the World's Greasiest KFC in Sparta for lunch and a grocery store to stock up on Cheerwine before returning to Virginia.
Much fun was had by all... or at least me. Enjoyed meeting everybody and having these people suddenly turn from a bunch of electrons on my screen into 3-dimensional beings.