This past weekend (July 5-6) was the Nanaimo Dragon Boat Festival. Last season there was drama! drama! drama! And since you probably don’t memorize my blog posts if you would like to refresh yourself on what happened click here.
We had a goal, win a medal to redeem ourselves from last year.
Well…we didn’t quite make that goal a reality. We did redeem ourselves by having a strong presence at the festival, by racing hard, by having new jerseys the other teams were envious of and by moving up a division to the highest division at the festival, yup, that’s right, highest division! Awesomeness! The only part of our plan that didn’t quite come to fruition was the whole winning a medal thing but hey, we tried and we were close and having close times with the teams we were racing against, teams that consistently rank in the highest division, well, that is nothing to sneeze at.
Overall we ended up ranking 8th place out of 80 teams, not so bad, right?
My team The Twisted Hips
The people there are still the friendliest people ever, it is a beautiful location for a dragon boat festival, the water is warm and clean, even with the rain the temperatures are still high. There are so many great things associated with this festival! 🙂
Overall the weekend rocked, we all got there Friday night, I didn’t get motion sickness while on the ferry going over to the island (yay!), the three teammates I was bunking with were hilarious, the food was tasty, there was lots of walking and racing and just in general physical activity. There was free paddle boarding both days, two of my teammates and I gave that a try on the Saturday. It was ok, I was paranoid about falling in to water while wearing my racing clothes so I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I might have if I didn’t have the worry of spending the rest of my day in soaking wet clothes lol Having said that, even if I had been in a swimsuit and not worried about getting wet I don’t think it’s an activity I’d do for an extended period of time, it’s not that interesting lol 😛 There were all kinds of food trucks but our team pools money and we have a little buffet of food at our tent (as do most teams) so I didn’t get anything from the food trucks, I did hit up Tim Horton’s for tea multiple times but tea is a whole different story, I can’t survive without tea lol
There were also lots of booths set up with people selling everything from home made jewellery, to official festival clothing, to dragon boat gear to scarves…the list goes on and on. There are also booths set up to educate people on things like drinking tap water or recycling as well as booths representing banks and other boring things lol.
I bought two bracelets as thank you gifts for the daughters of my friend, they came and checked on my cat while I was gone and I thought they’d get a kick out of some jewellery, shrug. I also bought myself a festival t-shirt. I buy a shirt not from every festival but from a lot of them, I like having a memento that is also functional lol
One of my teammates and I are taking part in a plank challenge, on the Saturday we decided to plank while in the middle of partying (cause isn’t that how everyone planks? lol) and the teammates that were present decided to get in on the action lol Planking is now a team sport!
The plank challenge!
Even though it was slightly overcast most of the time, and raining for chunks of both days I managed to get sunburned, a special talent of mine lol Oh, and I also managed to get injured, another special talent of mine lol
While planking someone leaned on me and somehow I ended up hurting my lower back, I don’t mean a twinge I mean I was in massive pain and had trouble standing up straight. Luckily one of my roomies has a mothering instinct and she helped me out, she got me a microwavable gel pack thing from the hotel office and walked me through some yoga that she thought might help the back get better. A combination of some sort of cream a friend had, plus pain pills, plus yoga, plus the heating pack led to me being ok to race on the Sunday. To be honest, it wouldn’t have mattered what level of pain I was in on the Sunday I would have still raced but it was nice to race and not be thinking I was screwing my back up even more lol 😛
The other injury is just stupid *rolls eyes* when I was paddle boarding sand got in my shoes, didn’t matter how much I rinsed them out some sand stayed in them and while I could feel the sand rubbing against my feet it didn’t seem like that big of a deal, I was wrong. By Sunday I had 5 open and quite nasty wounds on my feet, ugh. Couldn’t do much about them till I got home and really all I could do once home was wash the feet, put some polysporin on the wounds and wrap with bandaids. The feet are healing well, slower than I would like but meh, whatcha gonna do? I wash, reapply the polysporin and bandaids daily and am basically waiting for them to finish getting better. I’m down to three bandaids instead of five now so that’s a nice improvement! 🙂
The trip home went smoothly, once again I managed to not get sea sick on the ferry, this is a big deal for me in case you were wondering lol I had an unpleasant surprise waiting for me though, a spider apparently decided the best place ever to have her eggs mature was in my bathroom, ick! ick! ick! I came home to this…
Baby spiders. Lots of baby spiders. *shudder*
I went on the offensive asap, obviously, and became a mass murderer. Thought the situation was taken care of but the next day when I got home from work I had a smaller web with fewer inhabitants in the exact same spot. wtf?? So they died also. I then sprayed the entire area with Mr. Clean all surfaces cleaner, and I don’t mean a gentle spray, I mean I drenched the area, it was dripping off the ceiling! Chemical warfare at its finest lol Since then I’ve seen an occasional baby spider but no big webs and en masse gatherings so I’m hoping they have moved on or died. 😛
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 