Yurt Yurty Yurt STOMP!

Two weekends ago, a co-worker/friend of mine celebrated a landmark birthday. To mark this auspicious event, a group of us drove over a mountain pass and visited the town of Paonia for their Mountain Harvest Festival. Poor Paonia had no idea what hit it.

I’m going to blame the following events on the fact that we stayed in a yurt Friday night. There must have been something in the air there. Here’s the yurt, as of Saturday morning. We’d spent Friday night figuring out what we were going to do Saturday, so we had junk everywhere. Nevertheless, you can tell that a yurt is a nice place to be. At least, this yurt was.

What you can’t see from these pictures is that this yurt included a hammock and a large trampoline. I was in heaven. Even though I fell out of the hammock, and almost launched myself off the trampoline.

We’d chosen Paonia as party central because one of the main events of the Mountain Harvest Festival was a grape stomp/fundraiser that would benefit the local library. We rode into town on bikes that we’d bedecked with streamers and sparkle. We also attached tiaras to our helmets, and fairy wings to our backs. This turned out to be a good move on our part. We had time to kill before the grape stomp, so we split up and explored the festival on our own. It was easy to find our party since we were all pink, sparkly, and wearing wings.

Right before it was time to change into our grape stomping splendor, we caught the slow bike race. The idea was to be the last person to cross the finish line without ever moving backwards and without ever placing your feet on the ground. Hilarious!

And now on to the main event. Here’s our group right before we entered the contest.



 

The Stompers



The Cheerleaders

We were introduced, and the placid Paonians watched aghast as we asked the DJ to start the music. He played “You Make Me Want to Shout,” while we ran around and tried to get the audience to sing “You Make Me Want to STOMP” and give us donations for the library.

When our antics were over, our stompers stepped in a bucket of grapes, where they had three minutes to stomp as much grape juice as possible. The rest of us kept cheering and taking pictures.

Then came the one minute collection time.

We staggered with our bucket of newly-squashed grapes over to the judging booth, where our contents were weighed and judged to be number one! That’s right—we won!

Much celebrating ensued.  I haven’t had that much fun for a while. We might need to go back next year to defend our title!