It's a whole three months until the RinkUnion, so I decided to get in early with my account of what it was like, so as to avoid the rush later when all you other slaves to conformity describe it *after* it has occurred. This way, all I need to do is fill in the appropriate names later.


First, I spent thirteen hours on an economy-class plane flight to the US. I met Dave at the airport; he probably said some stuff, but by then I was randomly walking into walls and having slurred conversations with artificial trees in the arrivals lounge, so I didn't notice what it was. He was exactly the way I remembered from last year.

Mousie, who we met up with to drive to the hotel, was my first new-Rinkie-meeting on this trip. My first impression of Mousie was that she was little, and my second impression was that she never shut up. Between that and Dave's enormous deep booming laugh, I probably seemed to not have a lot to say, but at least Mousie was kind enough to say that she now believes I'm not a guy.

When we arrived at the hotel I saw ______ , ______ and ______ in the lobby. I recognised them straight away. Somebody else in the lobby turned out to be ______, but there was no way I could believe it at first.

Leen had her model horses and tack there. Wow. I thought they looked good in the photos, but it fell far short of reality. She was still all hyped up and buzzing from her nationals show, so we all heard about that.

The next day everybody else arrived. Or at least, everybody except ______ and ______ , who got lost on the way to the hotel and only turned up late that evening.

So, what was it like meeting all these people? It turned out that ______ is even funnier in person than online. ______ was much younger than I imagined. ______ seemed quieter, ______ was amazingly cool, ______ was completely different, ______ was exactly how I thought, and ______ was freaking *hot*. W00t.

Everybody kept trying to make me say things so they could hear my accent. Gah.

We had the traditional candy and drink tasting experience, and played some really strange games and listened to Sam reading out funny stuff. (I had been looking forward to that part and it didn't disappoint me. Even better than I thought.) The Moxie, however, tasted like ______.

On the second day, we went out to see the sights. I think I probably annoyed everybody by taking so many photos of them all the time, but at least I wasn't taking notes of everything they said as well. Also, the American Rinkies kept laughing at the number of things I found weird and funny about the USA, but with so many other foreign Rinkies there to agree with me, there wasn't a lot they could do about it. Besides, I still owed Sam and Leen and Dave for all the normal things *they* thought were weird and funny over here when they visited, so they couldn't do much.

This is also a good place to say that ______'s digital camera and ______'s camcorder were TEH RULE and I want one.

It was really strange for me to be going around doing fun things as part of a group of people. It all seemed a bit unreal at times. It was a new experience for me in many ways, but I thought it was great.

Nobody got any sleep at all for the entire weekend, except of course for ______, as you all know from the hilarious photo which ______ took.

All in all, it was the most fun weekend ever, and it was too bad it couldn't have lasted longer. I got a lot out of it, even if you don't include the fourteen occasions Stephen tried to kill me and the seventeen occasions Dave tried to hit on me.

I had been intensely nervous before the RU but it mostly wore off by Friday evening, because it was just so much fun to see everybody. I'm pretty sure most of them were disappointed at how unfunny I am in person, but they hid it well and at least I made up for it by having an accent. I invited a lot of people to come and visit, and ______, ______, ______ and ______ all said they would.

So now I can't wait until RU4 in 2003, and looking forward to writing all about it. Maybe by this June.