TribalCon 2005 or IceCon 2005?
The first annual TribalCon (www.tribalcon.com/) was to be held in Atlanta GA over the weekend of Jan 28-30.
We drove the imperial shuttle (my minivan) up to Atlanta from Tallahassee, with 5 other folks Friday, arriving about 5pm, and caravaned with 3 of our other friends. Our plan was to stay with our friends Keith and Barb who live in Duluth, and while Tara and I danced, the rest of them were going to be gaming (RPG). Five other folks showed late Friday night for gaming, rbinging our total to SIXTEEN so there was a houseful!
Saturday morning the ground and all vehicles are covered in ice. However, having experience in living in cold climates before, I am dressed and ready to go, have the car warming up, defroster is on and only need to find an ice scraper. Someone in our group has one, but his car is frozen shut! After a fiasco trying to get into the car with the ice scraper, and trying to scrape the layers of ice off my van, Tara calls to find out the ice storm came which had come through Atlanta Friday into Saturday, had shut down the school where the events were to be held at due to power outages. This coupled with dangerous driving conditions, postponed much of the events scheduled by a full day.
IceCon
So, now that all the dancing girls’ Saturday plans have been postponed, we go back into the house. Barb is cooking up a storm, making muffins and some kind of egg quiche thing that was oh so INCREDIBLY delicious. Drink a little more coffee, and I am feeling like I will be having a relaxing day, but wait, I am trapped in Duluth for an entire day, I am not a gamer, and with not much else to do, I prepared for my class on Monday, napped, and then about 6pm the non-gaming folks (4 of us) escaped the house to find something to do. After finding the Regal closed, and the AMC closed as well, we found a private theater and thought we would check out “Alone in the Dark”. I love cheesy sci-fi, but this was an absolutely HORRIBLE movie! The theater was also host to a video arcade, and to “Dance Dance Revolution”, an interactive ‘follow the leader with music’ type game, so Barb and I had a dance off, then I danced against the other girl that comae with us (I am so sorry but I forgot the other lady’s name!!) What a blast! This got our hearts pumping, and by the time we were done, we had quite a little crowd watching us 
By now it is 10pm, so we decide we should head back to Keith and Barb’s, only to find they were still gaming! but we had not had dinner yet, so, we made up some spagetti and salad, which was delicious, the game wound down, some western movie went in that I am unfamiliar with (Tombstone??) and once my food was gone, my gin and grapefruit was drank, I headed to bed.
TribalCon
We had only signed up for the Saturday workshops, but as it was canceled we attended on Sunday. But everything got all smushed together, since the show for Saturday had been canceled as well, so we went to dance class from 10-3, with an hour for lunch (and, due to no one’s fault but our own bad luck in navigating, we had a horrendous time trying to find food!) and then the evening show was moved to Sunday at 4pm. I was kind of sad since it seemed like ther was not enough time to shop, or relax and mingle much with dancers I had been talking to on various forums like tribe.net. Additionally, the ice kept falling from the trees onto the roof of the gynasium, making it sound like the roof was going to fall in (it didn’t, but the noises got a few gasps from us dancers as well as the instructors, who were absolute darlings about it).
We got out of the show at about 7pm, and we were all starving so we went to get food. Yummy fish tacos and sharing a pitcher of Guinness gave me an attitude adjustment, for the better, and we left Atlanta just about 9pm. I drove for about 1.5 hours, and was so tired my Michael took over while the rest of us slept the remainder of the way to Tallassee about 1:30am. What a great guy my hubby is
The workshops were fun and it is neat to see other people’s style of instructions. I am still tired and sore from Jill Parker’s conditioning exercises (my quads are KILLING me still!) and I know she took it easy on us so I feel like I need to work on that aspect of strength for myself.
The show was also good. All of the dancers were wonderful! I loved the Blue Moon Dance troupe, Awalim, Mamoudi; none of which I had ever seen perform before. Kassar was there, saw them perform at Spirit of the Tribes last year, and I enjoy their performance this time as well. There was another group whom I cannot recall their name, but they wore brightly covered skirts, were very ATS and I loved them too! I know the show was videotaped, and I hope that tapes (or DVDS) will be availbale soon!
Unfortunately, my camera decided it was as tired as I was, and took a lot of fuzzy pictures before the batteries died so I am missing pictures of some of the groups that performed.
Zi’ah was absolutely gracious and endearing the entire time. She is a wonderful hostess, and I hope that she will do this again next year!
This post was originally posted on my website: Feb 1, 2005