Lucy and I had aimed to leave at 10am for Okemo. We got off a little late, but in good order. It was a beautiful sunny day, although there was a haze that muted the autumn colors at a distance: the peak of Mount Sugarloaf was completely obscured. The colors were pretty, although not as good as some years. Lucy observed that the sumacs, which are often brilliant red, seemed brownish -- maroon at best. Still, the patchwork effect of mixing evergreens and autumn colors on the low mountins in Vermont is magic.
Traffic was heavy but moved well, except in one section where it narrowed to a single lane. We made it through in 10 or 15 minutes, but people arriving later said they had to wait for an hour or more. We also ran into one check point soliciting change for a local fire department. Ludlow seems to be doing well. There was a chicken barbecue and a chili cook-off in town. It looked busy enough, that we drove on ahead. We ended up stopping at Java Baba's for lunch, a newish place that is in the same plaza as Archie's Steakhouse -- right at the foot of Okemo Mountain. They have internet access, so I intend to go there tomorrow morning to post this.
After a leisurely lunch, we drove up to the lodge and checked in. I got a room on the first floor, but it's still the one at the very end up the hall, up about 4 flights of stairs. Luckily we packed light (except for the computer and the projector and the camera). After settling in, we wandered down to the akceptejo and registered for the meeting. Attendance was still very light and we grabbed a couple of chairs and sat outside in the shade of the building and admired the blue sky. It was warm in the sun, but cool and breezy in the shade. The crowd began to grow.
Some of the younger crowd set up a game on the grassfrom Sweden called Kubb. It was an interesting game that looks like fun, but it takes a long time to play (at least for the uninitiated). A pitch is measured and staked off. At each end, the opposing teams set up a row of 5 or 6 blocks of wood -- the kubbs. In the very middle is "the king" a taller block of wood with a crown carved at the top.
The players have 6 cylinders of wood, two inches in diameter and 10-12 inches long. First, each side takes turn tossed toward to see who can get closest to the king (without knocking it over) to see who goes first. Then they get all the cylinder to throw at the opposing kubbs. If they knock any over, the other team tosses them toward the other side of the pitch where they are set up as "field kubbs" and are now part of the opposing team's kubbs and the kubb closest to the middle marks the new baseline where the opposing team can throw from. All of the field kubbs have to knocked over, before any of the kubbs on the baseline can be attacked. If a team succeeds in knocking over all of the opposing teams kubbs, then they can use their remaining cylinders to knock over the king.
The meeting was delayed a bit because there were still more than 20 missing at 3pm, but then we had the opening remarks and a couple of presentations. Lucy and I were invited to join an Esperanto speaking family for a spagetti dinner in their apartment. Their 3 year old son can understand and speak Esperanto fluently. After dinner he asked to get down (in Esperanto). I began to extend my hands to pick him up, but then he explained he wanted to get down because he wanted to clean his hands. I withdrew my hands saying I didn't want to get dirty. He clarified that he wasn't dirty around his middle -- only his hands. I picked him up and set him on the floor to go clean up. A charming little kid.
After dinner, was the interkona vespero. Normando always has a series of games and mixers for people to play to aid getting to meet people. The theme this year was "sports". The first game involved putting a label on someone's head (that they couldn't see) with a famous sports-star's name and making them ask yes-no questions of the audience until they could guess who it was. Another couple of games involved forming groups around sports (or not sports) and matching Esperanto words to pictographs of sporting events. One of the games involved listening to national anthems and trying to guess the country. My team felt hopeless, so we called ourselves the Senesperuloj. As it turned out, we got 11 out of 30 -- about in the middle. The lowest was 7 and the highest was 14. I was only confident about 4 or 5 of them (US, Britain, Canada, France, and maybe Germany). I would have recognized Israel and might have guessed China, but Egypt? Ethiopia? Latvia? The other 23 were completely unknown and unknowable to me. Absolutely no clue. It was a nice chance to meet and chat with folks, though.
Finally, at 10pm, we broke up for the night. Someone caught me on the way out the door to make arrangements to have lunch tomorrow. The stars, which had seemed so bright and clear when I went over, were overshadowed by the moon, which is just past full. Lucy, who had dreaded being put on the spot to speak in Esperanto, had stayed in for the interkona vespero and was already asleep. Now it's my turn.