HantsFur meet - 24/06/2006 - AKA: Furries on the beach!

Had a great meet in Bournemouth yesterday.  Weather was much better than I had expected.  In fact, I had expected the weather to be so poor that people wouldn't want to go near the beach, let alone even in the water.  So I turned up in jeans, the whole time wishing I had brought shorts!

Anyway, things went fairly smoothly despite the train from my home town being late, I was still able to meet up with the others in Soton for the connecting train as that one was late too.  We played Brain Training's Calculation Battle on the train, which had to be the most fun anyone's had doing sums.  As we weren't able to get seats due to the train being over-crowded, we dubbed it "Extreme Calculation Battle!" (In manic Japanese announcer voice) as it was a challenge to stand upright, let alone do metal arithmetic.  beaitchtwo managed to thrash anyone at the game as he seems to be able to do sums really fast...

After getting to the train station, people went to McDonald's for food before heading down to the pier.  Played a few games at the arcades there while waiting for stu_ath to arrive.  When Ath did arrive, he stopped by briefly before disappearing with award to go drinking.  I didn't see Athaba for the rest of the day following that... Anyway, the rest of us went down to the beach, and those with common sense had brought towels and sun block and a number of people actually went into the sea.

After that, calgor, anthropuppy and I went for a walk up the beach before going to Harry Ramsden's for food (well, Calgor and I went for food, Anthropuppy went to return to the others by taking a shortcut of walking on the shoreline and almost drowned himself while climbing over a groin! (note: Groins are sort of big dividers they use for sectioning off bits of the beach)).  By the time Calgor and I had stuffed our faces full of fish (as cats do apparantly) we went off to find Wardy and Athaba before going for a game of Mini Golf.  However, we were unable to find them and ended up in Starbucks in Borders.

By this time, I had developed a raging headace and wasn't feeling particularily great.  We were just about to leave for the aforementioned golfing but then Foxdragon and Mike Wolf (not to be confused with electricdog) turned up.  By the time we were finally ready to leave, Calgor could obviously see I was feeling under the weather and offered to take me back.  I decided to take him up on the offer and made my good-byes and left with Bungle and Anthropuppy.

It was a fantastic day though, it was just a shame I ended up feeling so rotten and had to miss the mini golf (one of my main reasons for selecting Bournemouth for a meet anyway).  It did give me a feeling of wellbeing to have gone from suggesting the location and date to having 18 people in attendance.  Not sure if there'll be another, no reason why not I suppose, as long as it's held in the summer months.

The total roll call was: Me, paw_fox, TK, bungle_bear, washu_chan_uk, kyyanno, award, stu_ath, anthropuppy, calgor, beaitchtwo, 2 guys in black I can't remember the names of, paperkup, Kev (who also had a Japanese sounding furry name but I can't remember it... he's the one we buried), Draconder, Foxdragon & Mike Wolf

Photos of the meet can be found here.  And for an added bonus, you can see the photos from the last HantsFur meet held in April here!