Snowplains Meet, Cambridge, 22-24 November, 1996

A huge total of at least 61 spods turned up to Cambridge for the meet this time: Berry, Blob, Bongo, Bugsy, Cliffy, Cunning, Cunning's friend Chris (a non-spod), Dizzy, Dodgy, Fang, Gangsta, Garion, Gushie, Halfwit, the hatter, Irish, Insanity, Jaq, Jarel, Kestrel, Linden, Lks, Malus, Marble, Martyr, Mayn, Middleman, Molt, Moog, Mulder, MushyPea, Narenek, Nicolai, Obediah, Odie, Pantling, Phlebas, Pling, Posey, Raiden, Relsar, Rillaith, Roj, Rubberplant, Slym, Smurf, Spook, Static, Stud, tND, Trigger, Trouble, Tucks, Undone, Valkyrie, Vampire, Vento, Wabbit, Wakko, Xsquared, and Zach. Sadly, we didn't manage to get a group photo (at least none have been scanned so far, if you have one, let me know!..) so I'll leave the sides blank until I find something suitable...

Friday afternoon

Well, we went to Tatties for lunch, but sadly it was very was quiet.. Bugsy, hatter, Malus and Rilli made it there first, followed by Berry, Jarel, Pling, and Wabbit just as the first bunch finished. Still, the food is always good there, so we weren't complaining!

Spods started turning up at the Fountain from about 2pm onwards, leading to more than one red face stumbling out of the pub at closing time.. Fortunatly, we staved off having any spods being forced to stagger out earlier with their tails between their legs, but goodness only knows how! (Hey, at least the drinking society in the other part of the pub were drunker, louder, and more volatile of the stomach than us (yes it was possible...) *grin* Scary thought, huh?)

Saturday

We met up in town on the corner of the Market Square. We split up into groups for a few hours to grab food before heading off to wander around town, so spods could go shopping, see the sights of Cambridge, catch a play at the theatre (yes, people DID!), or go and play on Jarel's playstation, or whatever took their fancy. Meeting once again, we actually managed to find everyone, and we arranged for dinner before LaserQuest later on.

LaserQuest didn't really know what hit them when nigh on 30 spods turned up on their doorstep.. It was fortunate we'd managed to book an hour! Static proved himself to be the Snowplains LaserQuest Champion, with Rillaith coming second, which was a surprising result, as everyone was expecting Dizzy, MushyPea, and tND to wipe the floor with the rest of us! Sadly, or possibly fortunately, the results are now lost to the ravages of time, as the printer had apparently packed up!

In the evening, we finally all met up at the Fresher and Firkin, somewhere new to everyone, but with a huge floor, which we decided could probably just about fit all of us in without the squashing of the previous evening. We took over most of the end of the pub, althought as the evening wore on, the press of other pub-goers split the group in two. Undone won the award for Most Tarted-At Male during the evening, and Bugsy continued her striving towards earning the title of Most Tarty Female. It was generally decided that Most Tarty Male was a close competiton between the hatter and Nicolai, but since the hatter was commonly found otherwise occupied *ahem* the title of Tartiest Male Of The Meet had to go to Nicolai. I'm not sure if any of the females there stopped tarting themselves for long enough to earn the title of Most Tarted-At Female.. Any nominations?! (I know I certainly felt like the Person Most Hugged By Spods by the end of the meet! *wilt*)

Anyway, getting back to Saturday evening... Once the closing time arrived, and we felt we had scared enough bar staff who foolishly ventured into the Tarts Anonymous corner (I noticed we never had the same one appear to collect glasses more than once!), we gathered as many of the staff (including the newly elected ones too!) as we could for group photos. We all wandered homewards for another night, with Bugsy taking a handcuffed Undone back with her for the evening, and everyone else more or less managed to take more or less the right number or the right spods back with them, and a meeting place was arranged for Sunday.

Sunday

We met up in Churchill bar before lunch, or at least most of us did. The bunch of spods in Rillaith's room, having not actually gone to sleep until well into the morning, had to be woken up a good hlaf hour or so after they still hadn't arrived. *sigh* Have you any idea how difficult it is to make 6 spods get up in time for lunch when they only fell asleep at 9am?! Anyway, when they still hadn't turned up, the entirety of the other spods decided to pay a visit.. which meant hundreds of people crammed into Rillaith's not-substantially-large college room!

Once we could actually hear ourselves think, we volunteered Jaq and Middleman to take all the spods who wanted to leave by train within the hour into town for food, and then onto the railway station. The last I heard they were half-way to Inverness... The remaining very few spods attempted to walk (in the now horrendous downpour) to Zak's mexican for a little lunch to warm us up, but on finding that closed, ended up venturing all the way into town for lunch at Henry's. Then we got to walk back (just as we had just about warmed up and dried out, too! *pout*) through the still-torrential downpour. The last few spods left (except Bugsy and Undone, who left much later that evening, and hatter, malus, and wabbit, who left later in the week..) and things finally started heading vaguely towards normality...

Hopefully everyone enjoyed themselves as much as I did (once I got over the immense amounts of stress... It's amazing what a softening effect a couple of weeks has *grin*), and hopeully we'll have even more spods at the next one!

"QUOTE!"

As at any spod meet, there was a grand collection of dubious sayings and hilarious quotes from many spods. Several (dozen) were written down, and can be found here. If you have any more, let me know!

Other Spods' meet pages

As with anything like this, many pages devoted to the topic are written and proudly displayed on other web sites.. I have tried to include all the links I know of, but let me know if you decide to follow suit..

Fang's pictures of both this meet and others.

Pictures

A veritable plethora of cameras and snap happy spods attended the meet, which, as you can imagine, has resulted in a large collection of pictures. Some you can see (or will be able to in the not too distant future) on this page, while the rest are available on the ftp site, in directory pub/snowplains/pictures/meets/camnov96/. Any new pictures can be uploaded to pub/snowplains/incoming/, and are always welcome!

If anyone has any more photos from the meet, or wants to contribute some more to the tale, simply let me know.. Similarly, if you have photos on your own site, or have put up your own meet page and want a link from here to there, just drop me a line!

~Rillaith