Crown Tourney

We have officially survived Crown Tourney. We're home now, and planning to head off to bed relatively early because it's been a long, tiring weekend.

We headed off to the wilds of northern Vermont (one of the Lake Champlain islands) on Friday morning. My lady wife had agreed to cook feast for 125, and I was going to be managing the check-in. The first clue that we might not entirely enjoy the weekend came as we were loading the meat order (60 lbs. of beef roasts and 4 cases of chicken leg quarters) onto the trailer after picking it up at the grocery store, and realized that it was snowing. Not terribly seriously, and not accumulating, but very distinctly snow, nonetheless. It's not supposed to snow in southern NH before Halloween. I'm sure of it.

We arrived on site at about 4:30, got everything unloaded into the kitchen, and headed off to dump things into our cabin. (The site we were renting is a YMCA camp, so it included little cabins. The staff cabin slept 8, in four sets of bunk beds.) Then I went to get check-in set up, and discovered that the building were expecting to use for it was a) unheated, b) had a pair of doors that wouldn't stay shut because they had no latch mechanism, and c) had at least 3 windows missing panes of glass. We did solve the door issue by propping that set closed with a cinder block, but it was of limited help with the overall temperature. Friday night we kept check-in open till 11:30 pm, and it was *very* cold.

The weather for the tourney was beautiful, albeit a bit chilly. Everyone out in it being active was happy with it. Everything looked like it was shaping up beautifully, until around 3:30 four people had a sudden onset of nausea and vomiting. It appears likely that it was some sort of virus, rather than a food-issue, since if there had been an issue with the food provided at lunch we would probably have seen much more than the six cases that eventually turned up over the course of the evening.

Feast went on as planned, although a number people who had reserved decided to leave the event when they heard people had gotten sick. We ended up with only about 2/3 of the people we'd expected to feed, so there was a great deal of leftovers. Fortunately we were able to send much of it home with people to enjoy later, so it didn't go to waste. Unopened items such as bread commercially packaged breads are going to a local food pantry tomorrow. My lady's feast was very well received by the hardy souls that stayed. We finished cleaning the kitchen around midnight (And I cannot thank those gracious gentles who helped with that, and with serving the feast, enough. That will get its own separate post later as soon as we've had a chance to compare notes and make sure we haven't inadvertently left anyone out.)