This is honestly one of my favourite events at the moment. Every 4 years my extended family comes together. Any descendant of my great grandmother comes together every 4 years. My great grandmother was called Danny because dad (the eldest grandchild) wasn’t able to make a “Gr” sound)! My siblings and I were running the event this time. We decided to re-run it (after consulting) at the same place we had the previous one – Kelling Heath. It’s a nice campsite/cabin place in Norfolk and it’s easy enough for the UK based family to get to. It’s a dark sky area, there’s a pool, plenty of space, and we can hire out most of the cabins about a year in advance so we’re all clustered in the same spot.
It’s an absolute dream for Anna as she has a dearth of cousins in NZ, and there are cousins everywhere you look while at the GOTC. I had “fun” putting a website together for the event. I was absolutely determined to put as little effort in as possible (mainly so there’d be no maintenance burden). I started off with Google Forms, then we decided we’d want to be able to display it on a site, so investigated extracting the content and parsing it etc. etc, eventually moving to firebase. Anyway, it was getting more and more and more complicated (I’ve been accused before of being a rube goldburg programmer ;, so I decided to throw it all away and just build one from scratch in my regular programming language. Having to think about features like “no logins” and “85 year olds using it” etc. gave some interesting constraints. Still, I’m happy enough with how it turned out and it’ll be easy to re-use for following events.
There were over 100 of us altogether! Over 100!! amazing. And we really all just get on well. Pimms was drunk, bike rides went on, games were played, laughs were had – and the time flew by. We also put on a “show” at the end, and the kids (and adults) had a lot of fun with that. Rob – one of the in-laws was a great addition to the group, as he’s great on guitar and really helped keep everything on the track!
Anyway, just a really lovely time.
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