In which our intrepid heroes visit the box office, unpack a fire mirror maze, and set up camp.
After a long journey, we had finally made it! (To the box office…):
Our intrepid heroine ventures forth to stand in the (mercifully short) line:
At the box office, we found that the playa dust had formed itself into a message of some type. While we recognized it as being partially palindromic, we were not able to decode it in its entirety:
Tickets in hand, we continued our (now dusty way):
And we were there! You can see the green glowing man in the dusty[1] distance:
Day turned into night, we unpacked some, and ventured out the Charnival grounds to help unload the truck, bravely driven for days from Toronto by an amazing group of volunteers.
Normally, your first day on playa is for acclimation, but we had a lot of building to do, and the truck needed to be unloaded (including our fragile tube![3]). This would turn out to be fortuitous, as we lost an entire day to high wind and sandstorms (but more on that later).
Here, you can see the lighting of the Charnival grounds in the distance (it looks like I took this picture from my bike). Lighting is incredibly important, especially on open playa, with art cars and bicycles zipping[2] about. The Charnival grounds peeps did an incredible job:
We met up with the S3FA people, and much truck unloading ensued. You can see the result here, with our tacitly triumphant trusty heroine:
To give you an idea of why we needed a truck, here are the not yet assembled pieces of Mirror Blaze. Those are 4×4 8′ cedar (half the mass) posts with hinges (for easier[4] assembly), and 4’x8′ acrylic mirrors in a pile. It’s interesting how I automatically orient my view of this picture with respect to the fence and the Man, how I can feel where the rest of the festival is around me:
Some more components for Mirror Blaze, and some of its friends:
Next time, off to finish setting up camp and unpacking!
[1]You may think I’m overemphasizing the presence of the dust, but I’m really not.
[2]Art cars at 5mi/hr, and bicycles only somewhat faster in the (usually) hard-packed dust.
[3]A 7′ long 1′ wide quartz tube, used for keeping the flame effect away from the acrylic mirrors.
[4]Note that I didn’t say easy…