Fantasy Fest 2011

Here are the Photos you’ve been waiting for!

October and November have come and gone, and now that Halloween, the Haunted Fort, the Vampire’s Ball, Fantasy Fest and Thanksgiving are finally behind us, things have settled down to the point that I can go through the mass of photos from this years Fantasy Fest and delete the blurry shots, the foot shots, the duplicate shots, and the just plain nasty ones. For the most part I didn’t get rid of anything you wouldn’t want to see, well.. let me rephrase that.. well.. let’s just drop that line of thought altogether.

Here are the photos for better or for worse. Once again I’ve broken them up into four separate sections; Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and the infamous Dante’s Pool Party shots. As always, if you are offended by tits and such, DON’T LOOK. You might burn your eyes out.

I discovered just recently that Picasa Web Albums pretty heavily censored the shots from the Dante’s party, essentially deleting anything that most of you perverts would care to look at, so I think what I will do is post them up on Flikr where I can assign them an “Adult Content” tag. Google has no such feature, which is kind of a head scratcher to me, but what do I know. Anyways, stay tuned for that link to update soon.

Fewer House-guests This Year

And thank god for that. We only had Josh and Trevor this year, so things were relatively quiet around the apartment. The best part is we could actually get to the damned bathroom in some timely fashion. You haven’t lived until you share your apartment with 8 hungover dudes all vying for some face time with the porcelain phone.

Thursday Josh, Trev and I wandered on down to Dante’s for the Stripper Pole party. I must be getting old, because the crowd there really got on my nerves. It was so freakin crowded, you couldn’t get to the bar, you couldn’t get to the pool.. meh. I hung out for about 30 minutes or an hour sipping a dark and stormy while Josh and Trevor vied for a decent spot in the pool. I think I left before the actual stripper pole part started.. I just wasn’t feeling it, I walked back to the Porch of Destiny and chilled out with some Bob Marley on the Sirius and some of my own rum, which was considerably cheaper and less aggravating! Josh and Trevor got a shit-ton of really, really um.. interesting photos, which is obvious by how quickly Google took that shit down. The photos from last year’s pool party are still up if that gives you any idea.

After a while, Christina got home from work, my stunt photographers returned from their hazardous duty at Dante’s and we all wandered down to Duval to see what was up there. The crowds this year were twice the size that they were last year, it was amazing how many people were out and about. We walked up and down a time or two snapping photos and sipping rum drinks, eventually winding up back on the porch around midnight I think. I think Josh and Trev went back out after Christina and I went to bed.. crazy kids.

Friday is a fun day at Fantasy Fest, especially when you apartment is on the parade route for the “locals” parade that runs all through old town. In many ways, this parade is more fun for me than the big parade on Saturday. Maybe because it’s more intimate, there aren’t any barricades, and anyone can join in and walk. The costumes are fabulous, and it seems everyone is dragging along a cooler full of drinks with their group. Some even have rolling bars that pull up and hand out jello-shots or shooters.. We spent the morning fixing up a bunch of munchies and chilling out on the porch. The parade finally started, and it just went ON and ON and ON.. the cops finally tried to bust it up after a few hours because no traffic could move anywhere.. haha. It was spectacular. As a bonus, after the roads had cleared out a bit, we had a celebrity sighting as Kid Rock walked past the Porch of Destiny with a gaggle of hookers in tow. Trevor being the aspiring paparazzo that he is, was able to snap a photo. Way to go Trev!

Saturday finally came and instead of walking in the parade this year, we were able to visit the apartment of a friend of a friend who lives on Duval. It was a second floor affair with windows overlooking the parade route! Sweet! The only drawback was an ill-placed palm tree partially blocking one of the windows.. damn. Being the ever-fearless photographer, Trevor went down to the street and bellied up to the barricade to shoot some photos of the parade, while we sat in the comfort of the AC and drank. I say “some” photos.. but that’s kind of a misnomer. I think he shot like 600 plus of the parade.. good grief!

Watching the parade from up high is a pretty trippy experience, I can imagine it could only be made more awesome by an unobstructed view and an actual balcony to sit or stand on. It was awesome nonetheless though, and the floats were amazing. I think I may have had more fun last year when I walked in the parade, so next year I plan to build a float and put our whole crew in the parade.. we’ll see how that goes!

After the parade we all went down to Schooner Wharf and continued the festivities well into the night. I woke up sunday with a huge headache and went to WORK. GAH! Back to freakin’ reality.

Well, that’s the reader’s digest condensed and family-friendly version of Fantasy Fest at chez mike this year, nothing terribly insane happened, no one threw up or wound up in jail, so maybe we are all getting a little wiser. Oh wait.. Alex wasn’t there.. that explains everything.. haha. Anyways.. enjoy the photos, and next year come see it in person!

Cheers!
Mike