Weekend of dancing and dancing and kettlebells in a field!

only not in that order…

and only the kettlebells were in the field, the dancing was in a town…

Wimborne in Dorset in fact.

Mythago had been invited to dance at Wimborne Folk Festival

This was a two day event so we traveled down (it is 2 hours away) and camped on the Friday night and the Saturday night so that we would be fresh faced and raring to go on both Saturday and Sunday 🙂

or something like that…

Day 357 Friday:

Friday was a day of work and travel and putting tents up, there was no dancing on Friday but there was a little walking which is good 🙂

Not very much, just back and forth to town, not enough to constitute a day’s activity…but luckily, I took my kettlebell 😀

So once we had set up camp (this didn’t take me long…I’ll come to why in a minute…)

I broke out the kettlebell and got on with the day’s activity before I got too distracted!

I did a continuous set of:
20 x 2 handed swings,
10 x 1 handed swings (per arm)
10 x clean and press (per arm)
10 double handed swings
10 x snatch (per arm)
10 double handed swings
10 x high pull (per arm)

followed by
2 x 10 squat press
2 x 10 press up
3 x plank (count to 20)

I learned that plank in flip flops is tricky…

Later in the evening I also did some hula hooping but I am not sure how long this lasted 🙂

This brings me on to my second new thing for June…

Camping, without a tent, but instead, sleeping in the back of my Landrover Discovery.

look at it, there is loads of room!!

My theory was, if I folded the seats down flat, I could sleep in the back relatively comfortably.

I do own tents, I have been camping many many times, I just wanted to test my theory.

I also didn’t want to have to pack down a tent at the end…for some reason I hate it!

It was relatively successful! the main drawbacks were:

a) the fact that I couldn’t straighten my legs unless I was on a diagonal, and I put stuff in the way so becoming diagonal was tricky…

2) the fact that I had 8 windows and 2 sunroofs and it is nearly midsummer so I woke up when it got light at 4am!

all in all, it is nice to know it is possible, and I slept at least as well as I sometimes do at home so I consider it a success. 😀

Day 358 Saturday:

Saturday was an entire day spent, walking, and when not walking, standing and when not walking or standing…dancing 🙂

boy was there a lot of dancing!!

😀

this is what it looked like:

The Saturday of the festival, involved 3 dance stands of about 30 mins each and a procession that lasted about half an hour too.

It was a hot hot day! It was definitely not the day for dressing up in thik black tatter jackets and full face and head covering masks…but that is what we did and danced with considerable enthusiasm 😀

Hot work it might have been, but it was so much fun 😀 we had a really good day, were well received by the crowds and had lots of fun amongst ourselves 🙂

and this is what I danced:
Our Henry (x2)
Raggle Taggle Gypsy(x2)
Triskele
Spank the Monkey
Standing Stones
Changeling
Avebury Ring
King of the Fairies
Fanny Frail

on top of this there was a procession (as i have mentioned) there was also a walk each way back to the campsite and an extra walk around town a few times just for the fun of it after all the dancing was done 😀

Day 359 Sunday 

Sunday was similar to Saturday but in lieu of a procession we had another dance stand 🙂

woohoo more dancing…

Not that there was any possibility of being short on dances on Sunday, two of our dancers managed to injure themselves and (quite rightly) minimised the amount of dancing they did so as not to aggravate their injuries!

Sunday started off looking like it was going to be a cooler day than Saturday, however, due to some bizarre quirk of the English weather, every time we kitted up and put masks on the wind dropped the sky cleared and the sun started blazing down…

odd, we don’t usually have this sort of affect on the weather!

So on sunday,  I got more dancing in than planned…
Our Henry (x2)
Raggle Taggle Gypsy (x2)
Triskele (x2)
Fanny Frail (x2)
Spank the Monkey
Star of the County Down (x2)
King of the Fairies
Witch Hunt (x2)
Changeling (x2)
Thor’s Hammer

Which brings the dance total for the weekend up to 28! 😀

It really was an awesome weekend, the crowds seemed to love us, we drew a crowd on the last stand, just by arriving and standing about!

At this point i should mention my new favorite dance to dance out is Changeling, this also forms my third new June thing, as until this weekend I had not danced this dance out 😀 I love it now!

and last but not least I found my new favorite chair!

And as it is nearing the end of this project…I think it is time for another comparison!

We didn’t go to Wimborne last year, but we went 2 years ago, and it was my first ever dance out in my own tatters, so I thought I would show you the difference 2 years makes! (this is two years on to the day!)

I’ll tell you something else…2 years ago, I could barely walk back to the campsite after dancing…and I think I only did 3 dances or maybe 4 the whole weekend!!

with that Day 357 – 359 complete 😀