Getting to Black Rock City - Brian
This year was my 7th and Shannon’s 6th trip to the Black Rock desert in Nevada for Burning Man. We’re part of a camp called Black Rock City Animal Control (check out the current events for 2004….).
Normally we would stuff our 1980 Vanagon full of everything you could imagine and set off on the 15 hour drive from Seattle. Not so simple this year but we still had high hopes. We had brought our burning man clothes and equipment with us to Granada – who knows when they might come in handy – and planned more carefully then ever before. We decided that since the climate in the desert is much like here that the perfect thing to do would be to take some of our spanish learnings with us, that is how to spend the hottest part of the day from 2-5pm if you don’t want to sleep. We planned to run a chiringuito and had 2 afternoons planned. We shipped all of the food we could ahead of time, but one thing cannot be shipped – jamon.
Limited to 4 suitcases weighing no more than 24 kilos each and committed to bringing tapas to the playa we set off. With a 9 kilo leg of ham and 14″ ham knife tucked carefully in one of the suitcases. 20 hours later we arrived in Los Angeles and the customs checkpoint and wondered what would happen now – its not exactly legal to import a ham leg like this. It requires some creative filling out of the customs declaration.
As we picked up our luggage we noticed customs agents wandering through baggage claim area with a food and drug sniffing dog. Fortunately it was a tiny dog, about 12″ high, so we avoided him and put the suitcase with the ham leg on the top of our pile of suitcases on the luggage cart. Next we had to pass through the customs guard who looked at our form and suitcases. “What’s in the suitcases?” he asked, eyeing the stack of 4 large suitcases on our cart. “Clothes, stuff” Shannon said. He gave us a look as if to say “Yeah, right” and sent us over to the secondary inspection area with X-ray machines. We waited patiently, trying not to look nervous and briefly wondering what would happen if they X-rayed our baggage. The customs agent working at our inspection station left with the couple in front of us (no idea why), leaving a guy in chair reading a newspaper sitting behind all the X-ray gear. We waited patiently and nothing happened. Finally the guy reading the paper looked up and lazily came our way. He read our form and asked if we had any food. I said no and he waved us through. Next stop Reno, NV and after that Black Rock City!