8/28/13

I'm here, and still alive!

It took us 11  hours to get to camp.  We were expecting that, but didn't know what it would be like.  It wasn't too bad.  We drove the speed limit, and were Very careful.  About half the time was getting from our house to gate road, and the other half was waiting in line to get in, and then an excruciating 4 mile drive at 4mph to get to camp proper.

After that we set up camp in the dark and went to sleep.  I saw So many amazing things that night.  The art cars people manage to get out here are amazing.

Once we got Into the tent and settled ,  Sheldon looked at his phone and said there was no phone, data, or wifi.  It's pretty silly, but that was the thing that tripped my anxiety!  All of a sudden I felt very very alone and disconnected.  When we came in I got a sense of the size of this place.  It's gigantic.  It's 4-10 times the size I imagined it to be.  The city of Davis near where I live had about 50,000 people in it when I lived there.  This is bigger.  Going from one end to the other is miles.  I got
agoraphobic and spent a few minutes shivering, but since then I've been fine.

We did spend the first 36 hours close to camp.  We had to move our car way out, and the bathrooms are far enough I have to bike to them, so that's as far as we went.

Last night we took a walk out to the man.  It's actually more impressive from farther away, but we got to climb up into the base and see the city from a bit higher up.  All in all it was pretty neat and we saw a few art installations on the way.

This morning we went visiting.  We biked across the playa to center camp and camp Nosefish to see Howard and Franziska.  Next time we'll bring some cash and get some coffee.

Altaira scored tix for us for the motorized art tour in the morning, that should be awesome.  Tonight we're headed to a Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog Sing Along.

We're camped next to a camp called Playa Skool, which seems to be what people call a plug and play camp.  People pay a lot of money to show up and have their food and housing needs provided.  Last night they had a HUGE club which blasted 94 db of unfortunately generic music .  Sleeping in it was oddly easy.