Went to Sandbanks on the week­end. The weather was good, but danced from one extreme to the other along the course of the day. It was Trolley, Tomacini, Kate, Adam, and Eric on one site, Aaron, Karen, Nick, Alison, and me on another about 20 paces away. It was quite a dif­fer­ent crew from the one I’m used to, but def­i­nitely the one I was most com­fort­able around. These are the peo­ple who never ask for money, who talk to you like you’re fam­ily, whom you can depend on to find some orange juice if you’re hav­ing a bad trip. We only got in trou­ble one night, but we were admit­tedly loud. Our attempts to thwart such prob­lems by intro­duc­ing our­selves to neigh­bour­ing camp­sites proved fruit­less, as we were informed that the noise we were pro­duc­ing was being heard in a larger radius than expected. I took up posi­tion as the token Asian guy (keepin it cool) and Adam resumed his usual role as the token homo­sex­ual (keepin it fresh). The week­end went by quickly.

Aside from steak, the best part of camp­ing is the camp­fire. When the decid­u­ous trees flicker orange and the stars nor­mally hid­den by the city light show them­selves against the navy blue sky. There’s some­thing about the heat and the atmos­phere that puts the mind at ease. Nobody cares if one speaks too much or too lit­tle, puts on some head­phones and lis­tens to music, intox­i­cates, or pulls out a book and reads. It’s where every­one can do their own thing, together.

Sandbanks has an amaz­ing beach with large sand dunes, which makes it one of the most pop­u­lar camp­grounds, as well as one of the hard­est to reserve a site on (Trolley and I had this week­end booked since January). The sand is extremely soft and smooth, and the beach ended up being the only refuge for a loud group, espe­cially at night. It’s also where Adam was paid to mar­ket Gatorade to the homo­sex­ual pop­u­la­tion (and the funny thing is, Adam did his absolute best not to look gay in the pho­to­graph, but suc­ceeds only in the doing the exact oppo­site.) The cap­tion for the mag­a­zines would be, “ALL I DID WAS DRINK THIS GATORADE AND HOT GUYS STARTED LICKING STUFF OFF MY LEGS!”.

Aaron made his con­tri­bu­tion to the Ministry of Silly Walks.

At one point, Aaron and I had to steal some fire­wood from the other site. We decide to give them some flow­ers in return as a joke. Aaron just hap­pened to pass by a bunch of daisies, and plucked them from the stem as we were leav­ing our area. Unfortunately, the entire plant became unrooted with almost no effort, from the flow­ers to the roots. After a quick twig-splint used to fix a man­gled stem, we planted the daisies in the mid­dle of the other camp­site. They stood out con­sid­er­ably, since they were over four feet in height, with noth­ing else around but gravel and dirt. In return, Adam planted a lit­tle vodka gar­den out­side our tents.