September, 2006
A toe in the water
There is a place in the heart of the South that lures people with the promise of rhythms that start in the light of warm sunny days and morph into the dark starry nights. Dancers take the floor in front of the bandstand to express how the music compels their bodies. This is Nudestock at Cedar Creek Park. It happens every year during the last full weekend in September and has been an event for the last twelve years.
Tents sprout like mushrooms for days in the area surrounding the multitude of RV’s. They tend to cluster by their home club affiliations - Colabears, Cypress Cove, Bare Buddies ... with kindred spirits from places near and far mixed in. People announce to each other the number of years they have made the journey. Johnny and Wanda proclaimed this was their first nude experience ever. Bikers from Ohio were here for the seventh time - more than the owners of Cedar Creek, Susan and John, who have only been to Nudestock for the last five years.
A petanque tournament is held one morning with the winners taking home part of the entry fees. This year’s winners were Tammi and Larry.
The music seems endless. Well, okay, the bands take the mornings off to give us time to recover from the night before, but by the time the sun is high in the sky, the pulse of the instruments resumes.
We went, like almost everyone else, for the fun of it. There are vendors who, I suppose, must consider this celebration to be a form of work. But most of us were there to meet others of our kind and just relax.
Banners flourished everywhere announcing the vendors’ wares or groups’ affiliations. We hung our AANR-East ensign on the front of our coach, though before it was even up, word had begun to spread that the Roving Ambassadors had arrived. We were glad. Cedar Creek is an AANR 100% club and most people at Nudestock were friendly AANR members. Mary and Bill Williamson, our Secretary/Treasurer and Member Trustee, manned an AANR-East booth and did a brisk trade in t-shirts and other AANR-East paraphernalia.
While we had gone to Cedar Creek on a personal visit to hear the music and dance, we were glad to get a taste of what being ambassadors would be like. We made contacts with several clubs that we hope to visit in the near future and got to spend time with John, the owner of Cedar Creek, learning how he came to own a nudist park.
What's next?
We are starting our official visits with the Halloween Party at Coventry Club & Resort in North Carolina. Check it out: http://www.coventryresort.com/weekend.aspl . You can find us there from October 26th through the 30th. It may be “official”, but mostly we expect it to be “fun”.
American Association For Nude Recreation
Last updated February 20, 2007
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