Adventure is out there!

This past weekend Jen and I traveled with some friends to an Advanced English Coutnry Dance Workshop in Iowa. We stayed in a seedy Super 8 motel. We got the last non-smoking room in the place, which happened to be a handicap accessable room with one bed. And it smelled pretty bad, too. Our view out the window was an old truck from decades past.

The band was Bare Necessities, whose recordings we use heavily at our own dances. The location was a neat sort of 1950's dance hall. The music was great quality and I really enjoyed it; but the cross-dressing flute player really unnerved me. The hall with the wooden floor was neat, but the drawings of nude ladies in the refreshment room made getting drinks a perilous mission.

We all got sore. It was eleven hours of dancing in two days. The dances were more advanced than what we teach, but I think I can say we more than held our own dancing among the lifers(those who have been dancing all their lengthy lives, which most of them had).

We got all dressed up for the formal dance on Saturday night. Colonial clothes are the best.

We were very glad to have our friends there. The atmosphere between the two different dance camps, conservative and liberal, is extreme and can be stressful. We joke that there the people who dance ECD are either home schoolers or hippies, and that's really fairly accurate. It was an adventure to attend, and I'm glad we went.