morning all,
here is my take on skeggy:
Journey - Unfortunately very long. Took us nearly 11 hours to reach home (Aberdeen). Big thanks to wuzzle, andy and von for driving us down and back. Had a good group of friends travelling together so that took away the pain from the long journey.
Accomodation - (oyster bay) nearly as far as it gets, around 10 minutes from the venue. Not a major issue if you are walking while your fresh, but if its after you been dancing for a while and your feet are knackered it does seem like an endless road.
JA did provide shuttle buses that run every 20 minutes. Which was really nice of them, although the service stopped at 3 am, so if you were dancing after that, you either limped home or kept dancing till the shuttle service resumed in the morning
Chalet mates were excellent as usual (wuzzle, kat and andy).
Classes - Didn't do that many classes as usual but the ones i did go to were fab.
wcs- absolutely fantastic and this is the opinion of all I had spoken to regarding the workshop. It wasn't the usual boot camp where they went through the basic patterns but they showed how complex moves can be broken down into a series of basic pattern. Really good teachers, will definitely recommend
Tango - Amir's classes are always fantastic. I only managed to go to one of them as the other one was at 10 am on sunday morning Thanks to little monkey for partnering up for the wksp.
Jame's Line dancing - didn't do the class but heard great reviews from plenty of people. Knowing how james classes are, I wouldn't be surprised.
- One workshop missing was to do with ballroom dances. Although a minority, usually the waltz classes do go down quite well.
Rooms - Danced mostly in Arthurs and Jaks. JA seem to have swapped the flooring which was previously in reds to Aurthurs.
The flooring was one of the biggest issues that I have come across this weekend. Both were tiled and both had some of the edges protruding slightly. ladies kept getting their heel caught along the edges and in some cases had their heels wrecked .
The floor in redz and aurthurs was a bit sticky and a bit hard on the feet. Jaks was fab and thankfully no one put any talcum powder on the floors.
Surprised that they changed the false flooring that they had in Aurthurs in feb.
Music - was great most of the time. Don't know about redz as hardly spent any time there. Another issue that came up was the lack of freestyle session for latin dancers.I am sure they could do swap one of the late night MJ slots played in Aurthurs for Latin.
The freestyle slot for ballroom was quite small (30 mins), hopefully, they can push it to a one hour slot next time around.
Cake - lovely - thanks to little monkey, pjmd and others for their baking. really helped keep the energy going.
People -
There were the usual mix of dancers and muggles which you get used to. In our block of chalets, there were few muggle families and it was the same for in other blocks as well. It would be easier to have all the muggles and dancing folk in separate blocks.
Its not that I have problems with muggles but the sleep cycle for dancers and muggles are totally opposite.
Overall, this weekend has been better than last skeggy weekender. There are issues that still needs resolved and in due time most of them will be resolved.
One thing for sure, skeggy will never be as good as southport was during its peak with JA running it (unless they move to some other location). This is mainly down to the venue and the ease by which you can filter from one room to the other.
Will i go back to skeggy, yes, I am already booked for the one in September.
happy dancing
signing off
sinbad
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