Horrific Hoe Down, No Left Overs Club Rewards, and awaiting the verdict of Cornbreak Cookie Kendra

I know my friends you will be relieved to learn that I survived the night with only minor back injury from the aforementioned folding cot. I enjoyed a 5:45am wake up, courtesy of the 4 girls closest to me who thought it would be fun to draw images by directing their shining flashlights on my face. Hilarious.

After last night's Hoe Down, I for one can truly appreciate all music created without a fiddle. We gathered in the same tarpaulin covered space we had been welcomed into upon arrival the day before by our eager hosts. At night the space is transformed into a sub-freezing dance hall, complete with dirt floor and senior citizen fiddling trio, aptly named "Slim Pickins." Slim himself loves his fiddle beyond all imagination, while his overweight, balding "guieee-tahr" playin' girlfriend was notably less enthusiastic. The trio is rounded off by the near sighted and wild haired mandolin player, who had the presence of mind to keep her comments on the history of her six stringed instrument mercifully brief as the crowd approached a mass-hypothermic trance.

The kids were shown several dances and then the "caller", a naturalist whose name escapes me as it was so very cold that I am quite certain my brain cells froze and were incapable of retaining the admittedly extraneous data, began calling out the steps. The now blue-lipped children participated as best their near frozen limbs would allow and I huddled beneath the one heat lamp in the entire area, fending off little people as they tried to approach and displace me from my key position at the front of its flickering warmth. When finally Slim and his enthusiastic elderly accompaniests had had their fill of fiddling fun, we were dismissed to our bunks for a night fraught with tossing and turning in my sad looking cot.

After the early flashlight-rich wake up, I am now off to a frigid al fresco breakfast where "Cornbread Cookie Kendra" has promised to personally inspect our plates and decide whether or not each and every one of us will make it into the "No Leftovers Club." If I make it into the club then I will get a star on the "No Leftovers Club" chalkboard. I am a sucker for a star, so I hope it's worth the dense french toast congealing in my stomach. Then I will be off on a 7 hour hike with the complaining prepubescent masses. What delightful organic waste will I have to compost this morning? I can hardly wait.

my best,
Lightnin'