Today is our 31st anniversary.. !!!( we’ve been together 43 years) I’m so happy and lucky to be married to Diane.. my love, best friend and partner in everything>>
I love you my girl !
We spent the day hangoing out with jim and sue. we went for a great hike on mt rose.. then had a great lunch
Sue and Jims son Dylan was a great friend to Sam and Gabe,. he passed in 2011 Jim showed us soem custom shoes he’d had made in Dylan’s memory
we headed home to clean out the camper in prep for takign it back.. ir was pretty covered with playa dust.. you can see the dust one the road in front of sue and jims where we cleaned it out !
at the end of the day, we headed to the grans sierra.. we’d made a non refundable reservation for tonight.. so thats where we spent our last night in Reno.. it’s an adventure visiting the place.. it was already filled with people coming back from the playa…
dust everywhere !>. they actually had a hose rinse off peoeples feet before they entered the hotel 🙂
Cant beelive it’s saturday already.. the week has flown past… iot feels like the burn had a late start because of all the wether.. but still its been so much fun. I love being out here with the whole family
thinkign about it.., this is my best burn ever.. and I think this is number 7.
so our plan was to pack up, do a little more looking around then head out early afternoon. Our decision to leave today was a but of a change.. we’d initially planned to stay only until wednesday.. then we changed our mind and decided to stay for the whole thing.. .. including the temple burn on sunday night..
we changed our plan again because our plan is to go visit my mom for her 92nd birthday.. based on the traffic we’ve heard about on the access road (aka exudus traffic).. we’d have to leave immediately after the temple burn, drive through the night, cleanr the camper and drop it off all before 8am on the next day. that sounded increasinlly non relaxing.. we then through through staying to watch the man burn.. but even that would entail braving the 5-7 hour wait for exodus..
leaving today seemed like a good compromise.. we’ve has a ton a fun and we’d be leaving on a high
i’ve/we’ve really enjoyed the people in camps.. we’ve made many new freinds this trip.. here’s a set of pics of all of us..
Max and gabe left before we did.. they were headign oppossite directions.. back to their very busy lives
we spent an hour or so saying good bye to folks
I even said goodbye to our neighbors (el pulpo folks) dummy freind.. one of their fire team couldnt come this year so hthey had a dummy of him placed at their campfire . We also went over to say goodbye to claire and skunk .. then it was time to go
Firefly and gizzo had decided to come with us.
we loaded up and headed out.. .. we made it from the gate to the pavement in only 45 minutes.. thays 3 hours faster than i’ve ever done ig..
the drive back to reno was fun.. we droped soem stuff off at fireflys freinds, then dropped firefly and gizzo at tehier botel… it was surprisingly hard to find.a hotell
DIane and I then headed to Sue and Jims.. we had come int reno a day early.. so we got to hang out with them… which was good fun|
they have a spectacular view from their place !
its going to take a minute to get used to the default world again !
Diana and I went out for a quick explore in the morning. It’s been a lot of time working on the camp and fluffy and just needed to get out. We went and saw the man which was fun. They also visited Max at his camp and visited our cousins to see our cousin.
Mid afternoon we all met up again and went as all four of us to the temple. The temple is a part of burning man that is devoted to healing and remembrance. It’s a large wooden structure that’s burnt in the final day of burning man. I go to every year and bring things like stones… This year we brought samstones and a bunch of pictures of Sam, my dad, Diane’s parents, Dylan, Marie and for each hung some pictures and wrote some stuff and thought about them and cried a lot. It was hard and it felt very good. We put all of the pictures n, a picture of Ozzy Osbourne because we knew Sam would like that.
All around us people were doing the same thing for their loved ones. It was very very moving
Sam would have loved burning Man, but would’ve rolled his eyes about the temple..
But we were there we ran into our cousin Ben, who had pictures of Arnold and Ellen… That was pretty special to run into him just randomly like that with pictures of our common and lovely relatives.
Anyway… We walked around and took in the scene. It was both heavy and heartening.
I think Gabe even wrote that on a picture of Dylan… “Dylan you would’ve hated this place”…..
The temple was not about remembering our loved ones and friends who had died… It was also a place to make other tributes. Gabe burnt his Darol because he had achieved his goal relating to his degree.
We left feeling good about our visit. We went home and got ready to go out for the night
aroudn. 9 we blinged up and headed out on fluffy.. we styed out until 5 AM.. it was one of the most fun nights I can rememner of my life.. which is say alot. it was so great beign with family. playing with fluffy meeting people and seeing them enjoy fluffy.. sooooooooooooo fun !!
around 11 pm we went and met up with our friends at the loop . They were still working on their lights and it struggled. I woke up with the idea of using the four par can tflood lights to help them light their piece.. when we got there tonight we saw how well that had worked out. The piece was beautiful. We had several fire spinners, including some neighbors like our friend not a spider. Max also had his staff so it was a beautiful fire show. At one point in the show Claire got up on top of the loop and spun. It was so beautiful.!!
I saw a guy named Chris in the crowd who had also made synchronized rope lights just like mine. It was so fun talking to him.
It was so great to see the loop people enjoying their own work. It was a beautiful piece. And they had managed to be successful against a lot of pushback. I was so happy for them.
From there, we went out to look at art and dance.. Max and aaron wre djing and they were so good !until about 5 AM
At one point evening we came across a beautiful art car that I’ve seen previous years. It had these really cool snake eyes and what was strange is that my glasses at exactly the same code. I put my glasses on snake and ran into the other guys car I found him… He couldn’t believe that I had the same eyes. It was a really, really fun moment.
We got home about 5 AM to find that Bert and Elizabeth’s camper had been locked. Max and Gabe save the day. Max climbed up on the roof and was able to work open a bathroom vent. Gabe took off almost all clothes and was able to slip in down through the vent and go and open the door. I didn’t get any pictures of that, but I found some posted. I’ll try to figure out where they are and post them.
This was an epic night of the most fun nights I can ever remember in my life.
Today was pretty quiet… Some friends of ours that we’ve met out here a couple years ago from Netherlands came by. They actually had had their wedding on fluffy. They came back to tell me where they had put the samstone we’ve given them. It was really lovely to see them.
Diane , gabe and I headed out to see our friends at the loop. They were looking structurally good.. but were still way behind with their lighting. A combination of the weather and some personal changes made things tougher. We spent a few hours trying to help them. We actually got stuff blinking, which was great. It was important to have some lights on it because the department of Public Works was threatening to have them close because they didn’t have enough lights to avoid collisions at night. That would’ve been a huge shame. I was very impressed with all of the loop people skunk an and alencia and Seamus was still kind and cool even with all of this pressure
