Destiny Lounge 2009 Membership Info

Destiny Lounge is a group of about 25 folks, mainly from the LA area but not exclusively, whose intent is to create a fabulous relaxing and interactive environment for participants at Burning Man. To the general attendees, our camp offers abundant afternoon shade, ice cold lemonade and ice tea every afternoon and evening, great music and dancing, a good place for fire spinning, and our jumbo games! For our members, we offer a comfortable shaded member lounge, well equipped kitchen, community drinking water, hand wash station, hot shower facility with evap system, large shade structure to tent under, and new for this year, an elevated private viewing platform to observe the festivities around you. Our camp has an extensive infrastructure of canopies, carports, generators, lighting, carpeting, furnishings, etc. We enjoy creating a wonderful place to call home for our nearly 11 days on the playa!

What we ask from our members is this: a willingness and commitment to be involved to the best of your ability in our camp for the duration of the event. Once we are up and running, there is plenty of time to head out and explore the playa, but it takes a lot of effort to create, maintain, and remove our little wonderland. Commitment includes our setup, which begins on Friday this year, where we will have up to 15 of our members with early entry passes to get the bulk of our camp in place prior to opening at 12:01am Monday morning. Our goal is to be complete by mid day on Sunday this year. Since not everyone can arrive early due to the limited number of passes we receive and personal schedules, we ask that ALL of our members make a commitment to stay around thru Sunday of the Temple burn to assist in the tear down of the entire camp. The more the merrier! We also need volunteers to assume key tasks throughout the week: we need a tea and lemonade master, a recycling master, a general camp cleanup master, a master of mechanical maintenance, and we need camp operators and babysitters, who commit to watching over the place at all times based on a schedule we will work out on site. Our games require a certain amount of hosting and "barking" and we have too much stuff lying about to ever leave the place fully unattended.

We also ask for money. Alas, nothing in life is free. This year we are asking for $300/person or $500/couple. These funds would be payable, to me, at least 1 week prior to August 25. No, I can't wait until we hit the playa, as experience has shown this to be a bad idea. The fee covers the numerous expenses we incur each year in staging and executing our camp. Rest assured, I do not make a profit on this. Our expenses include truck rental, fuel, drink supplies, construction materials, expendables... etc etc etc. We've already been buying things for a couple of months now and the list is still growing.

Destiny Lounge provides a well outfitted kitchen, complete with microwave and 3 stage dishwashing arrangement, but we do not provide any food or beverages, other than the camp lemonade and iced tea, which all are welcome to drink. Due to the numerous dietary variances of our many members and the difficulty in maintaining any sort of schedule on the playa, its been commonly agreed that it makes more sense for people to provide their own meals rather than attempt to do communal meals. We urge members to consider water use in all meal preparation and try to keep water usage in the kitchen to a minimum. We have a fairly elaborate recycling and trash separation scheme in place and also ask that all members conscientiously adhere to it. We also request that our members limit their shower usage to not more than once every 2 days. Our evap can handle quite a bit of water, but there is a limit, and if everyone took a daily shower, we would rapidly exceed the ability of our system to cope.

Our schedule is roughly as follows:

• Aug 15 - 23 - Collect all camp materials from my home in Joshua Tree. We will be having a few "work" weekends between now and then to get things ready, including both games. We will get a truck and haul all of our things to Monrovia where they will be staged for loading onto the playa bound truck.
• Aug 26 - Load truck for the playa in Monrovia
• Aug 27 - Drive north to Reno, where our caravan will get some hotel rooms and enjoy one last real mattress and shower before heading to BRC.
• Aug 28 - Drive to BRC, hopefully hitting the gate by 9am. Get our placement and begin building our camp. Day one includes carpeting, main shade structures, kitchen tent, and tent shade structure. Shower and evap system if time allows.
• Aug 29 - Day two includes game assembly, viewing tower assembly, general camp decor and whatever else we need to get done.
• Aug 30 - Day three is our finishing touches day, where hopefully we are fine tuning the games, cleaning up the general mess of our construction and getting ready for a great week!
• Aug 31 - Sept 5 Black Rock City in full swing!! Don't forget to participate in some trash sweeps while you’re there!!
• Sept 6 - All members assist in full tear down of camp! By the end of Sunday, the only things left standing should be your personal tents. Last showers will be Saturday morning to allow our evap time to get rid of the water.
• Sept 7 - Final camp cleanup and full line sweeps of Destiny Lounge. We usually depart camp and enter the Exodus line about 9:30am. Caravan to hotel in Reno, arriving mid to late afternoon. Shower, cleanup, nice dinner.
• Sept 8 - Stop at Rubbish Transfer Station in Reno to get rid of trash and carpeting. Also recycling drop off. Drive south to Los Angeles.
• Sept 9 - Drive to Joshua Tree to unload majority of truck once again. Truck cleaned and returned by end of day in Los Angeles.

I'm grateful to all of our members for their on-going commitment to Destiny Lounge! We really do have a wonderful camp and group and it takes a great deal of effort to make it happen every year! As with any list of rules or guidelines, there will be exceptions. Please feel free to talk to me if some of this seems beyond your capabilities and we will work out something if possible. Being a part of a theme camp is definitely not for everyone, but if you'd like to be a part of something great, please join us!