Tuesday 24 February 2015

Sooooooo

I got tickets to Burning Man!

Yay!

It's a totally stressful process... you have to have a Burner profile and then you have a week to pre-register for the sale and then on the day of the sale you can click the link they sent you when you pre-registered and then you wait in virtual line to see if there are any tickets left by the time you're at the end of the line!  GAH!

They say it's first come first serve and that twice as many people register for the sale as there are tickets available and seeing as you can buy two tickets maximum, you have about a 25% chance of getting a tickets and I have no idea how 80,000 people can be processed on a split second clicking process but that's why I'm not an IT person.  And the IT people have all talked about it and written about it and the best analogy I've heard was ball bearings being poured into a funnel.

Needless to say, I tried to stay calm leading up to the time tickets went on sale but I got really nervous the last few minutes before and then once I clicked the link it was a matter of watching the time ticking away on the "waiting" page.

One hour wait... forty minutes...line paused (gah!) ... line un-paused ... more than an hour (oh no!) forty minutes...thirty... ten... ten... ten.... five... two...three...one....three (GAH!)... you're in... anddddd?

STILL TICKETS!!!

So I got one for myself, one for my long time friend who's going to be a first time burner and I got a car pass (they're trying to reduce the number of vehicles being used) and texted Connor to let him know I'd had luck. 

He was still in line and would still be in line for another half an hour before being told tickets were sold out.

Poor Connor.

Fortunately, our gal Natalie from 2013 also managed to get tickets so Connor will buy her second and my friend Sarah will buy my second.

I'd worried for a long while because Sarah had another newbie friend who wanted to come and I had a newbie work friend who wanted to go but my work friend wasn't able to financially this year and Sarah's friend seems to have opted out so all those times I told myself not to worry, I was right.

Which is why I'm telling myself not to worry about the rest of it. 

I've got six months to put aside the money I'll need for food and gas and incidentals, and maybe the dollar will even recover a little by August, right? 

And Connor and Natalie and Sarah and I can meet and talk about how we want to get down there and if we take one vehicle or two and Sarah's already said she can leave earlier with me if I need to be back from work (I'm going on a family holiday earlier in the month so don't have as much time off from work as I would like, but I'm not complaining) so I'm learning, once again, that Burning Man is teaching me to just breathe and relax and trust that it will all work out for the best and I shouldn't worry because it doesn't help.

So, you guys?  I got my tickets to Burning Man!  WOO HOOOOOO!

And whew.

5 comments:

Jason Langlois said...

Congratulations!

And relax and trust. If any lesson is clear over the last year or two of your blog, it's that you can trust yourself. Because when you do, it does seem to work out for the best.

Elliott said...

Congrats!

No need to worry...you're an old hat when it comes to Burning...no sweat, you've got this one cold.

Victoria said...

I'm trying to do that as much as I can Jason, because yes, it does seem to work out, you're right.

Thanks E :)

Anne Roy said...

Last night my solicitor / neighbour told me that his youngest daughter has a ticket to Burning Man ... she is going to travel from the U.K. for it ... I said that a fellow Cdn whose blog I read is also going!

You can look for her ... laughing like mad ... Kaiti Grove ...

Anne, Cdn in England

Victoria said...

Adorable :)