Hello Crazy Person!
Are you interested in becoming a part of our little group? Would you like to feel like you are contributing to the greater good while at Burning Man? Do you like gladiator movies?
(That has nothing to do with camp membership, we just like to know who we’re dealing with!) Well come on in then!!!
Destiny Lounge is usually made up of 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 and lounging space, ice cold lemonade and ice tea in the afternoon, great music and room to dance, a good place for fire spinning, our nearly famous Rock Yer Balls game, and this year, our newest interactive installation: The Oracle!
For our members, we offer a comfortable shaded and separate private member lounge, well equipped kitchen, community drinking water, hand wash station, hot shower facility with evap system, large shade structure to tent under, and an elevated private viewing platform to observe the festivities around you. Our camp has an extensive infrastructure of canopies, carports, generators, solar panels, 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 in return is this: a willingness and commitment to be involved to the best of your ability to our camp. 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 before the Gate opens, where we will have 10 - 15 of our members with early entry passes to get our camp in place prior to opening at 12:01am Monday morning.
Our goal is to be complete by midday on Sunday. 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! Please let me know how much of our schedule you can be a part of as soon as you know!
We also need you to volunteer for various tasks throughout the week such as making the tea and lemonade, helping with recycling and camp cleanup, general camp maintenance and the ever important camp watching. Our interactive stuff requires a certain amount of hosting and "barking" and we have too much stuff lying about to ever leave the place fully unattended.
An important note:
We are not here to provide a base of operations for E addled sparkle ponies who we only see every couple of days when they need to change their clothes. Since we are a relatively small group, we have a very low tolerance for cling-ons, and goofballs. While a certain amount of partying is fine, please don’t be “that guy (or girl)” that we all want to cause grievous bodily harm to by the end of the week! Try to be sober and present at least for a little while each day so that conversations can be had, and if you have taken on a shift as camp watcher or lemonade maker or whatever, please be sure to show up!!!
As with most theme camps, we have to look to our members to help financially with the camp expenses. We have no big corporate sponsor and this stuff ain’t free! This year we are asking for a minimum donation of $200 per person. I say minimum, because we will happily accept more if you can do it. Some of our group will contribute in non-financial ways, but we still need money to pay the bills. These funds are payable, to me, at least 1 week prior to August 26. No, I can't wait until we hit the playa, as experience has shown this to be a bad idea. Cash is always preferred. The donation covers the numerous expenses we incur each year in staging and executing our camp. This is not a profitable endeavor. I assure you we spend far more than we ever collect from the group. Our expenses include truck rental, fuel, drink supplies, construction materials, health permit, handwash station, expendables... etc etc etc. We start buying stuff in April and it just ramps up from there! It also appears at this point that fuel will likely be over $5.00/gallon by August!!
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. Nothing yuckier than gross kitchen wastewater in the evap! 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 or 3 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:
• From now until Aug 23 Collect, clean, and build all camp stuff including the Oracle. We will be having a few "work" weekends between now and then to get things ready, including a video shoot for the Oracle content. Much of our prep work is done at my house out in Joshua Tree. I have a couple of extra beds and lots of room out there for camping and it makes for a fun weekend and way to meet other members of the group.
• Aug 23 Rent truck in LA and do some pickups of items around town, then drive to Joshua Tree
• Aug 24 Load truck out in Joshua Tree – great to have a big groups for this!
• Aug 25 Caravan north to Reno, where our caravan will get some cheap hotel rooms and enjoy one last real mattress and shower before heading to BRC. There is an option of staying on one of our member’s property in Reno, but that would be camping for most folks.
• Aug 26 Drive to BRC, hopefully hitting the gate by 10am. 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 27 Day two includes game and Oracle assembly, viewing tower assembly, general camp decor and whatever else we need to get done.
• Aug 28 Day three is our finishing touches day, where hopefully we are fine tuning everything, cleaning up the general mess of our construction and getting ready for a great week! We should be done by midday.
• Aug 29 - Sept 3 Black Rock City in full swing!! Don't forget to participate in some trash sweeps while you’re there!!
• Sept 4 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 5 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 6 Stop at Rubbish Transfer Station in Reno to get rid of trash and carpeting. Also recycling drop off. Drive south to Joshua Tree.
• Sept 7 Unload majority of truck in Joshua Tree. Drive to LA and return rental items as necessary. Clean and return truck.
We really need folks to commit on either end of the journey if not the whole nine yards. Theme Camp membership isn’t for everyone. There is definitely work involved and many hands make the load lighter! The great feeling you get from creating our unique camp is something you will never forget!
I'm so grateful to all of our members, new and old, 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. Thanks!!
-Doggy Dave-
