Post June Faire Traumatic Syndrome.

.....It's been a week since June Faire ended. I'm just now starting to perk up a little bit with the realization that there is indeed life after June Faire. :-)

.....This year was TOUGH!!! Probably the hardest June Faire I think that I've ever participated. The run up was fraught with nervous anticipation. The surprizes were numerous and hardly ever good. But we managed to survive, an ending of which I wouldn't have bet on being a week or two before the event.

.....I was Renart's Deputy for Camping this year. It was my first time doing this job. When he asked me to be his deputy I said yes mainly because I had never done it before and was curious to experience to see how it was to live through it. It was also an opportunity to examine the actual physical site closely to learn all of its good points and bad points. Mainly to know how best to use the various section in future years. Although now that it is over I have my doubts as to whether we'll ever use it again for June Faire. But you never want to give up something completely. You never know if you might be forced to use the site due to nothing else being available.

.....Port Gamble kept giving us different stories on what they would do and have done in preparation for June Faire, so it was initially difficult at best to even map out our usable space. Would this section be leveled? Would this section be filled in with dirt? Would this swamp be dried out in time for June Faire? These unknowns were still unknown up to a couple of weeks before the event. But Renart did his best to work with what he had. I helped him with measurements a time or two. He spent several other occasions mapping out space and taking reservations. He then spent a great deal of time tetris'ing reservations out on a map. Which ended up looking pretty good. But we were both a bit nervous when we realized that every mapped inch of land on the new site was basically filled with a reservation or some event required space. We crossed out fingers and hoped that everyone coming to camp at June Faire had taken the time to make a camping reservation.

.....On Thursday I drove the Budget Truck Rental to site and arrived a little after 9AM. Renart and I started laying out lines for reserved camping. As usual, when we actually spray painted lines we found that the land didn't lay out anything like the map and we ended up running out of land before we ran out of reservations. We did a little tetrising and hoped for the best.

.....On Friday the cars started lining up early, easily before 9AM. Renart and I did a little last minute laying out of space and then held our breath as we approached our first car, who did not have a reservation. Renart showed him some space and I went on to the next car, who also didn't have a reservation. I started getting a little nervous, so I went down the line of cars to see who had reservations and realized that by the time I hit my thirtieth car that hardly ANYONE had a reservation. We started getting creative at this point. Space that we had saved for RV maneuvering went to camping space. We squeezed the A&S village HARD. We placed people in areas that we had earlier thought of as too swampy to camp people. I mean we squeezed HARD.

.....Most worked with us and made space for those with no reservations. People got cozy. People experienced groups of people close up whom they would never normally experience. In the end it worked. But we lucked out on a couple of points. One was that we had approximately 1,000 campers. There have been some June Faires that have had almost 1,500 campers in attendance. If we'd had that many people on site we wouldn[t have made it. I'm still not sure what we would have done. I don't even want to think about it.

.....The other thing in which we were lucky was the weather. It was relatively dry the week before June Faire, and it stayed dry through the weekend itself. A couple of days after June Faire ended there was a couple of days of thorough soakings of rain. If it had done that just prior to June Faire and / or the weekend itself, June Faire would have been absolutely miserable.

.....I think that we are determined and motivated enough where, like I said, I think that our time in Port Gamble is at an end. In fact some of the alternatives look rather cool and interesting in themselves. I've fallen in love with a couple of them. Even one old standby, the Kitsap County Fairgrounds, looks better in comparison to this Port Gamble offering. I went ahead and asked Kitsap County Parks and Recreation for a bid. It's liable to be expensive. But I was surprized at how eager the secretary was to see us come and rent the grounds. I asked for the bid about a week and a half ago now, I'll have to bug them tomorrow and see where it stands.

.....Now I'm tired again just thinking about it all. :-) More to follow as June Faire becomes more and more of a memory, instead of the raw emotion it is now. :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.