This was my first Toorcamp (though I’ve been hearing about it for 10 years)! It totally met (and exceeded) my expectations: I love hanging out with nerdy creative people! I love camping! I love the watery parts of the Pacific Northwest! I love having adventures with my family! Anyway, all those things were combined into one glorious event.

We drove up from California with a carload full of camping gear and projects, and took the ferry over to Orcas Island. My mom came to Toorcamp, too. She actually went last time in 2022 (when we were also planning to go but chickened out due to covid), so she is more of a Toorcamp veteran than us. She also found an excellent village for us to join, with folks we knew and a few other kids that my kid bonded with immediately, which made the trip even more fun and comfortable.

There were So Many Things to see and do and make and be part of!

We were camping right near the hardware hacking stage, so my daughter soldered not one, but two badges, including this Meow Mixer PCB. Soldering with Nana, how cool is that! My mom has an EE degree and and plenty of hardware experience, but I “rebelled” and went into software, so I have only soldered a couple times in my life (including fixing a headphone jack on my MP3 player). At this point, my daughter probably has the same amount of soldering experience as me. I love, love, love seeing what she learns from and with my mom.

There were talks, too! Including one from the Neocities guy about saving the history of the 90s web (which is the web I started finding my way around kid). My mom, being the enabler that she is, encouraged me to share my old Geocities address when it came to the part of the talk where anyone could voluntarily embarass themselves by doing so. (Heck, she’s the one that set me up with my Geocities account in the first place and left me to fend for myself with an HTML manual. My quest to find the elusive “cgi-bin” (which Geocities didn’t support) in order to make interactive websites is likely how I ended up doing what I do with computers today.)

One of the things I’d heard a lot about at Toorcamp before ever attending was the landline telephone network where all the gear was brought in and installed around camp. My friend Karl, who helps run Shadytel, had tons of stories of folks making tent-to-tent phone calls, of phones in the woods, phones in the bathroom, an under-sea cable, of sending DJ requests via fax and ordering tacos to be deliver by drone. (More on the tacos later!)

I really wanted to bring a cool (/interesting/novelty) landline phone to use at Toorcamp, so I bought this cat phone online. I had no way to test it ahead of time, so I’m happy it worked! Hearing a dial tone for the first time in… uh… a long time, was trippy. We used the cat phone to make calls to the deer facts phone (where anyone who answered was expected to provide a deer fact from a little booklet to the caller). Next time, I hope I get a cool phone number to go with the cat phone.

We also used the cat phone to order tacos! Actually, on the first day, the taco drone people were just flying the drones around dropping tacos by anyone who waved them down. My daughter and her friend basically fed themselves sky tacos for lunch and it was glorious. By the next day, the way to receive tacos was to dial “T-A-C-O” and describe where you were and how you could be identified from the sky. One of the drones had a string release mechanism and just dropped a foil-wrapped taco, while the other one had a little basket that would lower down for people to grab the taco out of.

There was tons more going on, too. Someone had built some giant tamagotchi clones and put them up around camp, including one that was easy for us to keep an eye on, feed, and play with. We signed up for the Shadytel “loyalty program” and got payment cards embossed. We visited the night market. We went to a birthday party for all the kids with summer birthdays at camp. I celebrated my own birthday! We helped run some activities at the kids camp. We cooked food with our own camp. We visited the outdoor soaking tubs and wandered around and talked to lots of people and saw lots of things.

Anyway, it was great. Now that we sort of know the lay of the land, we need to think about what to bring and share at the next one. Can’t wait for 2026!