Feeling a bit, well, burned out on Burning Man? Everything kind of starting to look the same year after year? If so, consider doing what we did: take a vacation from Burning Man while still attending Burning Man. 

Up until a month or so ago, Carol and I weren’t really sure if we’d be attending this year. After making the journey to Black Rock City 10 years in a row, we were starting to get a bit jaded and our enthusiasm for it all had really dropped in 2005. Plus, we knew we had our trip to Zambia happening in the spring of 2006, so we weren’t sure we’d be up for another adventure the same year. Therefore, we started telling people that we simply didn’t know if we’d be going to Burning Man in 2006, and we blissfully put it out of our mind. We spent the entire year not working on playa projects, not planning our camp, not doing a single thing related to the event.

In early August, we realized that we needed to make a decision one way or the other… after all, if weren’t going, we needed to gift our tickets to someone, and if we were going, we needed to make sure the Jeep was fit for the trip. After mulling it over for a while, we came up with an idea: we’d go, but do a very short trip. Instead of spending 10 days on the playa like we have been, we’d arrive in BRC on Monday and leave on Thursday, getting back to Seattle Friday evening. We’d be there for the initial build-up of the city, but get out before the weekend wackiness set in. Plus, we decided to radically scale back every aspect of the trip, from the size of our camp to the complexity of our food preparation. Simplicity was rule number one.

This was great! We arrived Monday morning, and thanks to our light packing we had the camp set up within an hour or so (this activity normally takes the better part of our first day on the playa). Over the course of the next few days, we leisurely wandered about, checking in with friends and exploring the art installations. We went running on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and decided to turn these into pieces of performance art. How? By carrying giant scissors with us. It took the groggy raver kids a few blinks to get the joke, but they seemed to like it.

(By the way, it was on this trip that we decided that a group of raver kids is called a glow. As in, “When the brakes failed on the art car, it took out a whole glow of ravers.”)

Thursday morning we started packing up, and once again our small camp made things ridiculously quick and easy. By mid-afternoon we had made the rounds and said our goodbyes, and we were back on the road home. With absolutely no exodus delay, to boot.

The end result is that we expended little-to-no effort on pre-playa activities, got to be in BRC during the best part of the week and left feeling good instead of tired and grumpy. We had barely hit the asphalt before we started exicitedly planning for 2007, which will be our 12th burn.

So if you find yourself in a similar space, where you just can’t get interested about doing it all again, give this a try. Just scale everything way back and make a short trip. Consider this to be the latest chapter in the Peterman Plan.