On Thursday, after a slow and lounge-y morning, we got all dressed up in our finest pink attire and went out to the front of camp to hear Halcyon do a talk for Hug Nation and prepare for the much-anticipated Pink Ride event. What’s the Pink Ride? Well, you can click here for the full explanation but the basic concept is pretty simple, really. It’s all about spreading love. Everyone who wants to join dresses up in pink, hops on a bike, and rides in a giant pink parade down the Esplanade to Center Camp. Along the way we make an effort to give all the people we pass a compliment and tell them that we love them. When we get to Center Camp, we make a biiiiiiiig circle outside (and this year it was a BIIIIIIIIG circle!) and hold hands and then spiral slowly inside to the center of Center Camp, and when we are all twirled in we break up into a giant group hug. Then everyone hugs everyone else they can and eventually we all wander off and go our separate ways.
I was distracted for most of Halcyon’s talk, but I do remember standing around outside in the blazing sun admiring everyone’s pinkness and waiting for the ride to get started. One highlight was being introduced by Anjanette to Tex Allen, who runs the “Why The Nose” project. I admire this project so much...it is so similar to a lot of what I am trying to do with my Fly Your Freak Flag High project. Tex gave me a pink (!) nose, which I am very sorry to say I lost somewhere on the playa between Pink Heart and Center Camp. I hope someone found it and put it on and it made them smile.
Anyway we finally “saddled up” and started riding to Center Camp, and it was really a ton of fun waving at people on the sides of the road and telling them how fabulous they were and how much we loved them. Then it was really impressive looking around at the giant circle of pinkness before we went inside Center Camp. Once we got to the group hug part, I was amazed at how good it felt to just hug and hug and hug so many other people who were happy to give and receive hugs and who appreciated being there in the happy huggy pink vibe. Seriously, this is one of those goofy Burning Man events that sounds like a bunch of hippy dippy bullshit but which is incredibly, powerfully, impactful in its effect when you are in it.
After things broke up some, Anjanette and Josh and I sat around for awhile in Center Camp and enjoyed having iced beverages and chatting with random burners (Josh even saw someone he knew from back home, who was in his crossfit class). Then eventually Anjanette went her separate way and Josh and I biked over to go visit Evan and Mary at their camp in the Burning Man ‘burbs. We hung out with them and their friend Oliver, and they made and treated us to pancakes and bacon, which was awesome. We hung out for a while and then made plans to meet up and go explore deep playa together later that evening.
On the way back to Pink Heart, Josh and I decided to go visit Sacred Spaces Village (the camp where we stayed in previous years). The layout and look of camp was completely different this year, much more open and less grand without the Guildworks shade canopies and fabric walls. We walked to the back of camp and were greeted by Kennedy, which was great. Then we walked around some more, saw what had been resurrected of the Temple of Renewal this year (it was mostly just the basic shower tower itself, without the walls and the decorative altar, shelving and dressing areas), and found our brother B Love. We had a nice time chatting with him for a while, and with another ex-campmate Raven, and then we got back on the road. Josh and I both agreed that while it had been nice to reconnect and see old friends, we were really glad we had chosen Pink Heart for this year’s burn.
We got back to camp sometime in the late afternoon, and had dinner with the Pinkies and then took a nap (afternoon naps turned out to be key because we slept so poorly at night) to prepare ourselves for some late night adventuring. We met up with Evan and Mary and Oliver around 10pm at Between Dimensions, and then set out to explore some nighttime playa art. We detoured over to MoonCheese first because we wanted to show it to them (and also showed them the glowing globe project we’d played with back on Tuesday night), and then headed towards deep playa, stopping to climb things and look at shiny bits. By around 1 or 2 it was getting kind of dusty and we were getting pretty tired so we gave up on going any deeper and headed back to camp. We wanted to catch the sunrise burn of Embrace, so we figured we might as well go try to sleep for a few hours and then get up and go out early.