I don't want to leave this place!

When I woke up Monday morning around ten I got up and talked with the neighbors and we all decided to stay an extra day because we were in the volunteer camping. I then went looking for tents and groundscores with Daniel and Sara. They collect tents from festivals to donate to Haiti, and I walked around with them helping them pick up tents and tarps and looking for other useful items people left behind. We got lots of tents, and I got a cart that I can put my ice chest on so it will roll now. We also found an entire trash bag FULL of great food. There was all sorts of snacks in there along with about twenty pieces of pre-cooked vacuum sealed chicken, lots of corn, asparagus, hot dogs, cheese, and my favorite, an entire package of bacon!! Someone came by and started yelling at us for going through the trash and was quite rude, but we just finished what we were doing and left. He said we were making more of a mess to clean up, but really we were just making sure that usable food doesn't go to waste. We went back to see what all we had gotten, and divide it up, and I ended up with a half dozen new chairs and as many tiki torches in addition to a new pipe, flashlight, and lots of bug spray. Most all the neighbors I was hanging out with had decided to stay, and we cooked some of the food and sat around and feasted. Around 5 it started looking like we were some of the last ones in volunteer camping, and we realized that maybe the post-fest volunteers maybe camped somewhere else. Around that time we all decided to go ahead and leave to avoid being hassled.
Sara and Daniel offered to let me follow them to a place nearby where they knew to camp, and we drove maybe 25 minutes through the beautiful NY countryside to Finger Lakes National Forest and a small little camp on the side of a dirt road next to a beautiful pasture. On the way we passed by a beautiful lake, a very large waterfall right off the side of the road, and several vineyards. We set about cooking some corn and black beans and then went for a walk around the pasture. Then I set about getting firewood and starting a fire while Daniel heated up some of the chicken. After we had eaten and Sara had gotten the car to read, Daniel and I were sitting by the fire when we see a car drive by and back up and stop at our site. It was a nice gentleman named David who had seen a piece of art on the hood of their car that looked like a Rainbow. He was looking for a small local Rainbow gathering that he had heard was in the area, and thought we might be it. I invited him to come sit by the fire, and we talked for a while before going out to the road to try and see fireworks from the valley below. Seeing the fireworks from 20+ miles away was incredible, they looked like they were tiny and almost touching the horizon. This went on for a while and then Daniel went to bed, and David and I stayed up talking about all sorts of things. He likes to do Native American crafts and showed me some of what he had, and I was blown away. All sorts of rattles and skulls and pouches and the like. The coolest thing was called quill work, and it is how the natives ornamented things before they had beads. They would dye porcupine quills and use those folded over as a sort of beadlike design. He told me about his kids and his late wife who had just passed, and I told him about my travels over the summer. We stayed up a while talking before I had to go get in my car and go to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning everyone else was already up and I got up and went and sat by the fire where David had some steaks cooking, and I ate one and we talked a lot about beads, and he gave me a lot of antique glass beads from the 1800s which I will use on my hemp necklaces and give to special friends, but not sell. After it got to be around 1:30 I realized that I had to go into town so I could update my blog, so I got everyone's contact info and hit the road back to Watkins Glen where I picked a package from my wonderful father which included his amazing cookies, notes from the family, a gift card, and some amazing crafts my sister made me at camp which included a quartz crystal, a leather bracelet, and an awesome tye-dyed shirt. I then went to the local library til it closed and have been at Burger King for the past 5 hours on my computer. But now I have the blog completely update, and I think I'll stay in walmart lot tonight before heading on to Mariaville, NY for Camp Bisco where I'll be meeting up with lots of friends.