15th & 16th January
Thursday morning.... my brother took me to the airport as my previously arranged ride had to cancel due to family emergency. Was picked up from Sydney my Mark and taken to the Sands where a few of the Scapers were already there having a beer. I was a much smaller gathering this year due to the OzScape convention at the begining of April. I brought along some presents for the girls again this year. Earlier in the month I got half a dozen cute orange plush bunnies with big floppy ears from Ebay and decided to give them away to some of them along with a A4 photo of them from either previous TaScapes or the 1st Farscape convention. Bwuce and Deb arrived later in the afternoon with Sue and her son Patrick that evening.
We did get some overseas visitor again this time..... two girls, one from Canada, and the other one, "Fialka", an American living in England. She was heavily involved in the SaveFarscape.com campaign. As there was only a small contingent this year, we didnt use the basement, so we crowded into the Committee room to watch some videos/DVDs.
After dinner we watched the episode of Stargate SG-1 that Claudia Black guest stared in, and then attempted to watch part 1 of the PKW mini series. It ended up taking almost 3 arns to watch the first 90 minutes as we were constantly interupted by casual observations and when Rebecca (from Canberra) arrived, we did a mini celebration for her birthday :) Several of the people stayed up well past midnight, which is nothing new at TaScape, I myself was on the balcony with Deb, Sue, Paddy and Stevie (Fialka) swapping jokes until 2am.
On the Friday we went to East Gardens again to have lunch and see a movie. I saw "The Incredibles" and the others saw "Finding Neverland" & "Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie". The girls didn't run into David Franklin at Big W this year, but Sue made a request to the staff of the supermarket there. She wanted the poster of the red sock puppet that was advertising something. The story behind is was the hand in the sock belonged to Matt McCoy, one of the puppeteers who worked in Farscape and he was flown all the way from South Africa, where he was working on the movie "Racing Stripes" to Australia just to be the sock puppet. God only knows why they couldn't get any one to do it :) I had a early night on Friday, got to bed before midnight.
Saturday..... We drove down in two cars to Darling Harbour to see the "Lord of the Rings" exhibition. Was excellent!! So much detail in the costumes and scenery, and revealed how they made the actors look hobbit sized on screen. Deb did the "Hobbit Photo" thing twice with some money she won at the pokies earlier. There were several screens showing short documentarys on behind the scenes, like the chain mail armour was made ring by ring.... how Gollum was brought to life. The only down side was no photography was allowed. One person was thrown out of the exhibit when security noticed a flash of a camera going off. Outside the Powerhouse Museum, where the exhibit was, a few of us stopped for an icecream cone. Before we returned to the Hotel we made our way to the north headlands of Maroubra Beach, where some of the scenes from "What was Lost" was filmed, saw the spot where D'argo's ship Lo'Laa was parked and what the girls call "Rape Rock". The spot where Grayza attempted to seduce Crichton.
Each year Mark puts a bet on at the Sands TAB on a greyhound that has a Farscape related name, this year it was Bensamore, and it won $150 !! so he treated us all to dinner at the local chinese restaurant since there was only a small gathering. So all I paid for is my drinks. The money I saved on food and drinks I had to use on the extra accomodation cost so it sorta evened it out.
Sunday..... BBQ and Raffle. Sue was part of the Dawn Patrol this year. I rocked up around 8am. It wasen't as windy as last year thank goodness but the wind did manage to knock of the bag of rolls, twice! so the seagulls were treated to some bread :) In several of the photos was a toy Wombat to represent Buck, one of the US scapers that attended last year, met a nice girl and got married to her recently. They were planning on comming to the OzScape convention, but had to cancel their trip :( Buck, well the Wombat version is featured in several photos this year.
Since its first TaScape in 2002, Deb has been calling out the names on the tickets but never has won a prize, but that all changed when she yelled out in her own name. After all this time she finally gets one.... onya Deb!! I got one, something I've been after for ages, a DRD keyring. I was thinking of putting on my keyring, but with the amount of jangling my keys take from daily use, the poor DRD would be destroyed in no time, so the cute lil' thing sits on top of the PC monitor instead. The highlight of the afternoon was when Jonathan Hardy turned up. We were all attentive to his stories. I was getting really tired, so I wondered back to the hotel for a refreshing air conditioned nap. I came back an hour later and Jonathan was still chatting away..... Unfortunatly Jonathan couldn't join us for dinner back at the Sands, so we said our goodbyes at the BBQ area and started to packup everything so we could get something to eat back at the hotel.
Monday..... As we didn't go on the Bus trip on Saturday, and some of the remaining Scapers wanted to see Arnessk again and to show Stevie some of the sites. I saw some parts of the battlements I didn't see last year, like the underground rooms and a spot were John and Scorpius did a scene in the PKW Mini!. A few hours after we got back, we all took a bus ride into the city and walked down to the Hard Rock Cafe, which is a TaScape tradition. If I knew about it last year I would of stayed an extra day to attend. Buck the Wombat came along, drunk himself silly on cocktails and the girls sung up a storm with "Dancing Queen" and "I will survive". They even had really good food there too. It was a great night out with great music and atmosphere. The bus we took back to Maroubra dropped us off at the beach, as the girls did their annual 'girls thing' on the beach, NO MEN ALLOWED. It was dark, so they wouldn't be disturbed. Then we walked back to the Sands, watched some more vids and finally got to bed around 2am again.
Tuesday I returned home to Melbourne..... Lets do it again next year!!!
VIVA LA TASCAPE!!!!