Great Trip!

Back from the Lovely and Green land of An Tir. :-) Had the most wonderful time imaginable, and I can imagine a lot! ;-) I love J/S, I really do. :-)

Met the Uber Cool young_raven, who is a Master of the Cosmo! Give her a big LJ welcome, folks! She and her husband will be down for our 12th Night so many of you will get to meet her. Met some other nice folks as well. Everybody was very welcoming. (And the people who had met misagillian the weekend before were big fans of hers! :-) ) The weather was perfect, and even the plane flights weren't so bad (although it was a dinky-small plane).

Very relaxed event at a beautiful site. Looked like an attendence of several hundred people. And I can't resist posting about new and different stuff:

-- You don't pump your own gas in OR! J/S and I pull up into a station, and we're talking, and he continues to talk, and I'm thinking, wow, we must be irritating the people behind us because we're not filling up. Then this attendent comes out and takes the card and I must have gotten one shocked look on my face because J/S just smiles at me and tells me. I'll all "Get Out! You're kidding!". Too funny.

-- In An Tir you can go out to dinner at the event. J/S and I had what amounted to a date dinner at a food vendor, in a big pavillion at a table, and pretty much shut the place down.

-- In the West people don't smoke. OK, every once in a while you see someone smoking, but it's pretty rare. In An Tir smoking is not general, but it is a lot more common.

-- Might have just been this particular event, but I saw a lot more kids running around and having fun than I'm used to seeing in the West.

-- The site had a lot of trees and we camped under them. Camping in a grove of trees was new and different (and no ticks!)

-- An Tirians do indeed seem to have a lower heat tolerance threshold than us Westerners do. Of course, we are pikers compared to those in heat/humidity kingdoms.

-- New phrase: "Woo Hoo, we're goin' to Pennsic!" (a sort of local in-joke; backstory on request ;-) ). Also heard an alledged quote from and Atenvelt Queen of, (said with a Southern accent): "I'm proud to be a pagan queen of a barbarian kingdom!", which seemed fitting to our squiffy state Saturday night. :-)

Now J/S are looking foreward to GWW, where he gets to camp in my uber-foofy tent set up. Looks like we'll be having North/South camp stuff. I bought a cup which I left with him, and I left him with 2 of my Historic Enterprises napkins, for starters. Insert oogly-moogly squeeing here. :-)

Two more observations...

-- People in An Tir sing. Like in general, as a matter of course. Now, it's not like there is not singing in the West, but it's performance or it's done in specially-designed environments (often private).

-- Down here in the West I'm known as a Laurel. Being a Viscountess is distinctly secondary, if known at all ('cause, really, that was a long freaking time ago -- 21 years, to be exact.) Being a Court Baroness is completely forgotten. Not surpising; I'm just part of the Great Grey Hoard. (Old Western joke: Q: What do you call a mid-level fighter in the West? A: Your Excellency. ;-) ). OK, I am in no way complaining, but I found it noteworthy that J/S consistantly introduced me as "Viscountess Genevieve", and that people called me Your Excellency. I'm not used to that. We *do* use titles down here when we are feeling formal or polite, so maybe it was just a case of my usual crowd down here being more used to each other. (Heck, I'm just as likely to be called Toni as I am Genevieve at an event anymore).

Must get work done now. :-0