Of course I would love to go camping with mom and everybody. There's an Irish music festival weekend happening up north too, which is the perfect excuse. I'm traveling separately, though, and running a little late. The festival grounds are sprawling and relatively flat. They almost look more like a vendor fair than a camp ground. Each camper has a little cube of space to fill up, and it's strange how other campers walk around and peer into their space. Mom and everyone have a cube towards the left/middle of the grounds. My cube is towards the right/edge. I'm getting there for the first time, but my space has already been set up a little bit. I'm careful to avoid the pot holes in my little car. I'm worried about parking it out of the way of the road, but my neighbor's campsite sticks out into the road a little, so I try to nestle the car so it doesn't protrude more than that, and so a car could still squeeze by. The sprawling campground is both indoors and outdoors in a way that I can't explain. My campsite has walls made of shelves and hanging sheets on three sides. Being on the edge, the side across from the entry doesn't need anything. It looks more like a shop than a campsite, but I have a mirror and I'm getting ready, so people should know it's not a shop. I have some big trunks full of clothes and I have a full sized bed with a headboard/footboard and a mattress/boxsprings.
I have at least one of the dogs with me, and probably two. Jackalus and Rublesnakies. They're hard to keep track of. They keep getting loose and running around and it causes me a lot of stress. Jack, especially, is being weird. He keeps leaving and coming back with near copies of himself - dogs that are almost identical but different in some small way. I thought it was weird that so many dogs that look like him were running around, but also relieved that my dog wasn't the only one running loose.
It's an Irish music festival and I want to drink, listen to music, and maybe jam a little bit. I don't know why I have Jackalus with me, he's a nuisance. I'm in a pub with him and realize that dogs probably aren't allowed outside. I go through some doorways to try to get out and end up finding a dog door to crawl through with him, but I have to walk on a ledge right over top of some kids' heads while they're eating. Their parents are understanding, but I'm embarrassed. Before going through, I see a bartender and tell him that I'll just have to have a quick Irish whiskey before crawling through this ridiculous door. He laughs and pours me a whiskey from a tall, oval, flat sided bottle. I drink it in a big gulp and wonder if people who see me doing it think I'm cool. I crawl through the door with the dog. When I get through, I realize I haven't paid for the drink and I become so embarrassed. I know I can't bring the dog back in, so I tie him up to a gate near the dog door. I feel insecure leaving him there because he could so easily go back in the dog door and bother the customers, or hang himself off that ledge with his harness. I leave him and hope for the best.
I walk back in and to find the bartender, but I can't find him again. I find another one and tell him that I had accidentally left without paying. He laughed and asked me what I had had. I told him it was an Irish Whiskey, but I didn't recognize it. I told him it wasn't Paddy's or Power's or Jameson. He said that only left one, a name I didn't recognize. I paid for the drink and walked into a big room where part of the music festival was going on. It was pretty casual, but it looked like people were starting up a big singing session. I was delighted. I was thinking about what song I might sing and a man came up to me and asked what I was going to pick. I told him I was still thinking. In my mind, I had decided to sing my favorite, Mary on the Banks of the Lee. The man said, "Well, as long as you don't sing something stupid like Mary on the Banks of the Lee!" The leader started up singing and that was exactly the song he chose. The man rolled his eyes and leaned over me saying, "See what I mean? So overdone and tired. They use it like a vehicle to get more trills out there. So obnoxious." I kind of did understand what he meant about the trills. The singer walked around the room while he sang, eventually sitting down on the floor. I thought he was being dramatic, and I also thought that I had never heard a singer's voice coming from so far below me before.
Later on they started up another singing session and there were some musicians from home. We were sitting in a line and a really lovely girl who sings and plays dulcimer was sitting next to me. I started singing The Roving Cowboy and my voice cracked terribly. She immediately chuckled and did an impression of me. I was humiliated, got up, and wouldn't sing anymore. People were mad at her for making fun of me.
They decided to go ahead and give out festival awards. It was Sunday all of a sudden, and the day was getting late. The mean girl one first place for her business and second and third went to people that I thought should have gotten it. (For the record, the "mean girl" is a real person who is not mean in the least.)
I went back to my campsite to back up and go home. When I got there, almost all of my stuff was gone. It had been packed up and moved to a loading area. I knew immediately that I had missed the deadline to leave and they had packed me up and would charge me an arm and a leg for it. It was sort of like a storage unit, they would have sold my stuff if I had waited another day. I found the manager of the campground and he explained to me what had happened. I saw my stuff packed up and saw how they had weirdly stretched my pink dress over and around a giant trunk. I thought the dress must be ruined. The mattresses were in big plastic bags. He said that normally a big pack would cost around $1000, but maybe we'll get to the desk and it'll be cheaper. I was horrified.
The woman at the desk started to get a bill ready for me. It had two prices on it, one that was five-hundred-something and one that was seven-hundred-something. I couldn't figure out which one it was, but they were both too expensive. She started shuffling through her records to figure out which one it was, and the manager came back behind her desk to help her. It was the five-hundred amount. I saw one of my co-workers in the back with a bunch of her students and I realized that packing up campsites was a fundraiser for them, and hoped maybe I could get them to cancel the extra fee or maybe I could pay for it in some non-monetary way, like covering her ballgame duties.
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