Burnt Toast! May 6th-9th

While Tracy and her boyfriend were unable to attend the small regional burn in North Eastern AZ because of financial issues - Matthew and I pulled some strings, glued things together, made it work - Enterprise ("home of the weekend special") gave me full rein of any car in the lot.  I chose this cute little blue thing, big empty trunk, never driven before, only 50 miles on it.... Perfect for a Thelma and Louise roadtrip....

While Matt browsed for hot guys on Facebook, I put together a Burning Man Checklist: 6x8 $20 tent from Target, tons of warm blankets, 1 gallon of water a day per a person (Also used to weigh tent down during sand storms/wind storms), baby wipes (no showers at the Burn), vitamins, food bars, saltine crackers, bananas, beer, wine, drinking cups, big heavy boots, really fun/funky/sexy costumes..... Ooooh and the new Sookie Stackhouse books.....

Never before have I driven through the eastern part of AZ (I have been just about everywhere else in the state) - There are the most gorgeous, majestic mountains out there.... like Flagstaff, but with far less people - It was around 6pm when Matt and I found ourselves checking into Toast, setting up camp.  Like the Playa in Nevada - The desert near St John's is really windy! Unlike the Playa in Nevada (which has absolutely no life or vegetation), Toast was full of bugs, cacti, and bushes - It was also full of cow poop.... LOTS of cow poop.  Luckily, with the 2010 Burning Man theme being Metropolis, our neighbor across the street started building cow pie skyscrapers and buildings to burn at the end of the week... which diminished the cow poop in our area significantly...

Again, unless you have attended Burning Man, I cannot really explain this festival to you - The Burn is nothing short of Magic.  Dancing with like minds, shaking it with facinating peoples, chatting with an exciting German man from AZ who chases Emu and creates fantastic fire-balloons from the 1500's, listening to songs sung from the heart, moments of love, stories of life, sharing a campfire in a 30 degree night - Matthew met a very interesting bi-sexual breakdancing millionaire who accidentally killed his 16 year old sweetheart fifteen years ago in a car crash - Matthew also partied so hard that he breakdanced all over my brand-new camcorder (oh well, so much for my 6 day old camcorder, eh?)  Randomly, I found a girl who was wearing one of the necklaces that Pat and I made for Burning Man last year - out of 55,000 people, Pat and I only made 200 necklaces and she had one right there in AZ - Also, Matt and I drunkenly helped this guy put together his Boma hut, which was made from PVC tape and insulated cardboard, only to find out that he was Tracy's neighbor at Burning Man in 2009 - It is strange how small our world feels when you really think about it....

This particular burn (which is less than 300 people) started to feel like home only a few days in - Faces were completely recognizable by the end of the weekend - It was a giant summercamp, full of art and positive ideas....

While the weekend really was a blast - Saturday meant the most - Around Noon, Matt and I decided to ban up with a camp full of botanists for a full day hike out to a canyon full of petroglyphs - Bags packed, water bottles filled, dogs unleashed, nine very happy people and five very happy dogs set off for a distant canyon - Three mile hike out was easy - Story goes that over 17,000 people lived on the canyon walls and water was plentiful - yet, sometime in the 1700's the water dried up and all the indigenous people had to move elsewhere - In present times, water still has not made an appearance but arrowheads and pieces of clay-pots litter the canyon floor.... While I hiked the bottom of the canyon - crawling over boulders, skirting cactus, ducking under bushes - Matthew, scaled the walls and leaping rock to rock, hundreds of feet in the air, watching birds fly beneath his feet (haha... maybe I am exaggerating a bit....but he was REALLY far up there, it was freaking me out).... The petroglyphs were brilliant - Scattered throughout the canyon, they were tucked inside of all kinds of nooks and crannies... it was like looking for jellybeans on Easter - Unlike a lot of ancient places where you only get to see one or two drawings - This protected canyon had hundreds.....

Hours later.... walking out of that canyon was not so easy... not easy at all - Nearly out of water, separated from a bunch of the group (most left earlier than us), drained from jumping over boulders in the 90 degree heat, dragging feet across three miles of sandy desert... I was sure the evening would end with Matt and I being ravaged by tumbleweeds... and yet, that constant and distant, pumping techno music drove us forward towards our temporary city... so familiar... that sound.  So Burning Man.... We found our home again...

Photos:  While I have no photos from Burnt Toast right now, Matt and I did make some friends who are going to try to email us a few pictures... :  )  So look forward to that sometime next week...!