Pennsic, working backward: The Trip Home
Sunday night I came home from Pennsic in a four hundred inch diesel deathtrap. Okay, I exaggerate slightly; the sticker on the visor said 32'3", but what's thirteen inches between friends? (I have a penis, so I'm legally required to exaggerate lengths anyhow.) The truck was loud, too loud for conversation, and it was old. The brake pressure warning light was stuck on -- allegedly the brakes were fine and a sensor was bad -- and the seat belts lacked shoulder straps. The knob for the headlights fell off when we tried to turn them on, and there were no high-beams (so I used the dimmer switch on the floor to flick the headlights off and on to signal other trucks they were clear to change lanes). The air conditioner blew everywhere except at the driver, and the instrument lights didn't work well (we had to turn on the dome light to check the fuel guage, and the spedometer was hard to read even when it wasn't bouncing wildly across a ten MPH range). At least the transmission was mostly just annoying rather than broken, though I did see it pop out of gear a couple of times while keith_m043 was driving. He compared it to a Chevette in that the first four gears were extremely "short", first being just enough to get the truck moving at all, followed by a race up to fifth, the only gear really useful for driving (though fourth came in handy occasionally on downslopes ... briefly). The clutch pedal was high enough that I kept bumping my shin on it.
I only drove a short stretch in the middle of the trip -- I'd felt pretty good when we started out, but by the time I took over a few hours in such a noisy cab had taken their toll on my energy level. When I started having trouble staying in my lane, I pulled over and we traded places again.
We were pretty late leaving Pennsic. I'd taken my time getting all my stuff packed (and took advantage of the time and sunshine to thoroughly dry my tent and tarps before folding them), fully expecting the truck not to be loaded until late, and I still had a few hours of sitting around and trying to nap after I finished. I wrote some of my thoughts about being on site that late as a diary entry, and will copy portions of that to an LJ entry later.
At the place where we stopped for dinner, on the PA Turnpike, a stranger stopped me to ask whether we were on our way to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and another who turned out to be an American Civil War re-enactor asked what period I was re-enacting. At a later stop in MD, to stretch my legs and use the toilet, other SCAdians spotted us and started a conversationa -- after first walking right past without even noticing my garb because after two weeks at Pennsic such things simply failed to register. (They were wearing mundane clothing). I think it wasn't until one of them recognized Keith's voice that they noticed who we were.
I finally did nod off in the passenger seat, about half an hour before I was needed to navigate into Baltimore. After getting my stuff off the truck, Keith decided he had enough energy to drive me up to Charles Village where I'd left my car (the first place I knew without weekly street-cleaning or daily rush hour parking restrictions that seemed reasonably safe) before heading on to his house. I'd been prepared to take a bus up there yesterday if he was too tired, but am grateful that I didn't have to. The car appeared unmolested and started right up. To my surprise, the leaky tire still had enough air in it to get to a gas station safely, so half an hour later I was checking mail, posting my "I got home safely" message, and falling into bed.
I guess the plywood, unlike the canvas, wasn't completely dry when I hauled it into the house. What had been a small obstacle in the front hall has turned into a near-total obstruction as the wood has adopted a more pronounced curve the more it dries out -- it now reaches the plastic bins stacked against the opposite wall. I'm not sure whether this is significant with respect to my ability to re-use the same wood for my floor next year; I need to borrow still more Carpentry Clue. But in any case, it represents a storage problem now.
Coming a little later: a little earlier.