We returned from the Gaian Mind Summer Festival around 4PM yesterday afternoon. I had a great time. The weather was perfect, it was all very relaxing, we met some awesome people and in all it was a lot of fun.

We drove out Thursday after a busy work day for me, ended up getting on the road around 6PM. On the way we stopped at Stoudt’s Brewery (because that’s what we do!), we didn’t order any beer (gasp) but I did order their decadent “House Pizza” which was: Wild mushrooms, artisanal blue, baby spinach, cheddar cheese, and roasted garlic pizza. – yikes! It was good, the perfect thing to send me off on our camping trip where we ate fruit, bread and granola for 3 days. By the time we arrived at the camp site it was around 11PM, we checked in at the gate and were given a pass to camp in the Members Area since we’d been to the camp before – score! When we got to the site had to pull the car in and shine the car lights at our camp site to put the tent up. It was around 1AM when we crashed onto our blowup mattress in the tent – and it got cold! I planned badly for the cold, having only brought a sheet and a couple blankets, but we survived. Oh and there was poison ivy everywhere that I walked all through with sandals on while putting up the tent, but I’m not itching yet so it looks like I survived that too.

Our camp

No reference point here, but Doug called this “Heart Attack Hill” when I walked with him to get coffee Friday morning, it’s quite steep but a nice shortcut from the members camp to the stone circle

Friday we spent chilling out. Met our camp mates, who included 4Quarters members Doug (from DC, whose son showed up during the weekend too), Tammy and Danny (from South Carolina). It turns out we were also camping with some neighbors! They live in the Royersford, which is about 4 miles from our home in Schwenksville. David works for Swathmore and his girlfriend Susan who works for a neat little company called Harmony Channel that makes videos with some amazing nature (and other) cinematography set to music work by artists such as Patirck O’ Hearn(!). We had some great conversations with these folks, and some other neighbors that stopped by our site to enjoy the campfire that we had going most of the weekend. It’s good to be the campfire tenders. Michael ended up hitting a sweat lodge, but I passed in favor of some alone time with a book and crackling fire. Friday night we got some rest before heading up to the Stone Circle to dance to some psytrance until the sun came up.

OK, so the Stone circle is WAY cooler (and more fun) at night when they have all the black lights on and crazy projections everywhere, but I can’t take pictures in the dark! So you’ll have to survive with just some photos in the daytime.

Saturday was similarly chill out-ish (that’s what I do when I’m camping!). We ended up going to a couple workshops in the late afternoon, both of which were busts. One was a “Discussion about sustainable communities” – I’m not sure what I expected, I guess since I was at a campground I was thinking about campgrounds as sustainable communities, that’s neat stuff. Implementing solar panels for power, growing food to feed campers who want on-site meals, all sorts of interesting stuff. The talk was, in fact, about communes, and people living on communes full time. Apparently “Sustainable Community” is the new term for “Commune” – and changing the name didn’t make them any better. I don’t have a problem with these self-righteous rich white kids who want to join a commune and live possibly without electricity per se, if it makes them happy – great! But they do annoy me. Their thoughts about how horrible the world is (I don’t happen to think the world is horrible), their grand plan to solve all these problems being in the entire world turning back into farmers (I think technology and progress away from everyone being a farmer is mostly good), cutting down trees is wrong and we should live in mud huts like the ones she visited when she went to Guatemala to see the poor people and live with them for a week(!) – and while holding all these beliefs – still saying things like using solar panels and organizing things using the Internet is good and important. Oh and when Michael showed up to the “discussion” with some Palo Santa wood to burn for incense she invited him to light it up, as she had just been burning some earlier sdf*(&FDS$fs%!! It’s ok to BURN South American wood as incense but not to build houses with North American woods grown specifically for that purpose?! Sigh, I guess this got personal, I went from “these commune people” to “that crazy woman” – oh well, she bothered me :) The second “workshop” we went to was the Festival’s key speaker – who was the same one as last year, Daniel Pinchbeck. The man is absolutely insane and has done/does far too many drugs, but sometimes such people are interesting to listen to. Not this time, it was the same talk he gave last year, and he managed to annoy me more this year.

The evening on Saturday was spent by the campfire. Lots of great discussion with our neighbors, I nearly finished my book. A sinus headache cut my evening short around midnight, while I greatly enjoyed listening to the music that could be heard as far as our campsite, I passed on the dancing that night. It was fine with me, I got my relaxing and “in the woods” time, so I was perfectly happy with the weekend.

Sunday morning we packed up, swapped contact info with our neighbors and drove home. Guess where we stopped on our way back? Stoudt’s Brewery! I ate a big burger, which tasted so good after a weekend of granola, bread and fruit and washed it down with an IPA, which was a bit more crisp than the Stoudt’s usually is, a nice surprise. As relaxing as I describe the weekend as, sleeping on an air mattress for the weekend isn’t the most comfortable thing and the sleep I got wasn’t the greatest, I was pretty tired when we got home. I’m still tired today but as the day went on and I got back into things at work I started feeling better, more refreshed. Even so, I’m going to have to see about taking off from work Thursday, Friday AND Monday next year instead of just Friday…