El Dorado Hills: Pirates at the Library, September 11 & 12, 2009

This was a two day event. With Friday being a school day from 10am to 2pm and Saturday being open to the general public from 10am to 3pm. The weather on Friday was really warm, but offered up a beautiful sunset...

Temperatures didn't drop until nearly 6am Saturday, with the coming of rain. Saturday had spurts of light rain followed by hot humidity most of the morning. With warm afternoon temps.

We had 1,000 kids through the door on Friday. And another 2,500 people through the door on Saturday.

We arrived Thursday to the request from Cap’n MacLaren to teach dance as well as do the treb thing, as one of his ‘teachers’ wasn’t able to make it. No big deal usually, rather difficult for us, though as we had a very small group. We ended up splitting up between St. Genesius & St. Barbara’s. So, Gwen, Tory & I took the dancing and Don Juan and Orion, ably assisted by Gavin, took the weapons demos.

We had groups on the hour and the half hour, for 20 minutes, with 10 minute breaks in between. The groups were usually 60 students per group, and were usually grouped together by grade. One of the groups St. Genesius had was actually a group of 80, 60 eighth graders and 20 kindergartners…quite a challenge.

We started trying to teach the kids ‘Haymakers’, as that’s a *very* simple dance, but the eighth graders were uncooperative and difficult to split into groups. We got them into eight different groups, and only ended up getting them half way through the dance in our 20 minutes. Gwen had an excellent idea and after that we had the girls get into a circle and then the boys into a circle around the girls and grouped them that way. It was easier. We also changed dances, and I vastly modified and simplified ‘Jenny Pluck Pears’, so that the boys wouldn’t have to touch the girls and even a baby could do it. This went over much better.

It was my observation that the Kindergartners through Second graders were much easier to teach to dance than the fifth and eighth graders.

Saturday was pretty crazy…at least until 1pm. We had lines, like Disneyland, of kids trying to fire Orion’s trebuchet. I couldn’t believe it. I took tons of photos of the huge crowds we had. At one point Don Juan had a line almost equal to Orion’s for the catapults, and Tory had a big following of folk to try on the chainmail. We were completely inundated. Crazy!

Best thing about the event: lots of grass; lots of patrons; room to fire either trebuchet; room to dance…& if we had more people on Saturday we would have, too, as it was we were completely overrun and really needed at least one more person; the people…this is another one of those locales (like Truckee) where the community is completely focused on their kids…we seldom saw adults without kids in attendance;

spending some time with the Governor’s wife Liselle, who kept us supplied with fresh cookies & sangria; and spending time with the Governor (Mykall VonTramp) who kept us supplied with fudge; meeting new folk: the Pirates of Sacramento, and being supplied with Breakfast; and spending time with old friends: the crew of the Dauntless.

Worst thing about the event: ANTS!!!!! Lack of people for dancing; lack of time (due to lack of people) to shop and visit the other groups/vendors.

Definitely worth a return trip!