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.