ANST - Canton a "Beautiful" Site?

[gunnora at realtime.net]

Aleksandra said, in the course of a slightly different thread:
>many of the major events are held in Canton.  
>Granted it is a beautiful site...

I disagree extremely.  It's not "beautiful".  It's excruciatingly mundane, full
of big street lights, blacktop everywhere, and so forth.

Yep, it's central, and yep, it's got electricity, and yes, we get a lot of use
out of it.

Still, I prefer the more primitive sites.  I like the more natural surroundings,
and it's lots easier for me to imagine myself in medieval times when the only
light at night comes from fires and torches, not from a zillion-candlepower
streetlight.

My favorite SCA site I've ever seen is Camp Ben McCullough (near Austin).  Nowadays
it's much too small for most events, and we can't have the whole thing to ourself
excluding obnoxious mundanes, but it's pretty, the river is nice, and it holds
many fond memories.

I'm sorry we no longer have Camp Burnet (the old Steppes site)as well.  It was
pretty, and while it had several modern features, they were all grouped together
-- it was possible to camp away from these and enjoy a more medieval ambience.


I'm not knocking the use of Canton -- it's useful, it's huge, and we can get
it with relatively little trouble.

Still, it would be nice to look for other North Texas sites... I keep hoping
that someone up there will stumble across some fantastic, beautiful site (beautiful
in the sense of esthetic, medieval appeal, I mean, not just utility) that is
inexpensive, easily reserved, and easy to get to.

For those criticizing about finding other sites, several years back Bjornsborg
put together several small teams for site hunting.  Several groups of us got
in our cars on non-event weekends and drove around looking for possible sites,
plus doing research in the phonebook etc.  It's not simple to find new sites
for as large a group as our average kingdom event draws, who have room on their
schedule for us to make reservations without having to make 'em 20 years in
advance, and which don't cost a large fortune to rent.  Try it yourself sometime
if you doubt how difficult this can be.

In the meantime, I'll squint a lot when we go to Canton, and hope for the discovery
of a site that's "beautiful" by my definition of the word... *sigh*

::GUNNORA::
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.