Burning Man European Leadership Summit 2026 (& Beyond)
Hannah and I took our van, Ripley to Burning Man European Leadership Summit (something between a conference and burn for leaders of burns in Europe). Afterwards, I had to fly to Greece for work while my partner, Hannah stayed with Ripley, then we resumed our trip back to the UK via Amsterdam.
Epsom
Disaster! We've spent the day cleaning every inch of Ripley, repacked every crate and stowed the garage neatly... We were leaving for the Ferry, just a couple of minutes late, but nothing bad. I pulled out of the driveway and, out of habit, turned as though I was in my car and not a 6.5m van. I swung into the gate post and heard a sickening crunch. The door is badly damaged and will almost certainly need replacing and repainting. So that's £2000 gone. On the plus side - new paint.
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We arrived at the ferry. There was minimal departure fuss and we boarded straight away. We had a quick supper and then settled down in our lovely cabin. First time I've had a double bed on a ferry. Hannah was very excited about what a cute little room it was.
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Nijmegen
Morning coffee, watching the cows go by We just slept our first night in Ripley being able to share a bed at a farm just outside Nijmegen, Netherlands. The new side pods make a huge difference. I'm 5'11" / 184cm and was able to sleep all the way across the bed. Before fitting them, I had to sleep diagonally across the bed and Han would sleep on the sofa.
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Arrived at ELS! Ripley parked up at the venue with 3 or 4 other campers.
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The mornings at ELS appear to be conference style auditorium speaker slots. The event opened with the Burning Man CEO, Marian Goodell, giving a talk. I found it pretty alienating as the language was very much reinforcing their views that real burning happened at Burning Man and the regionals were like burning for kids who haven't graduated to the real thing yet. One line was "and there are some of you here that have never even been to Black Rock City - you should be so proud carrying on the culture without having experienced it". I've got so little interest in Burning Man - it seems so corporate and culty. And the American Burner scene seems so different to the Euroburner crowd. I honestly think they need to be looking to the regionals for culture & ideas. The fundamental problem is they see us as children rather than siblings. This trend carried on during the deep dive sessions where Burning Man type humans seemed to be saying that the reason that problem x existed at a regional is that as a younger event, they've not had time to implement Burning Man infrastructure / processes - but had an obliviousness that we actually want to do things our own way and sometimes explicitly differently. Our group was focused on "How to establish rules for acceptable behaviour (while allowing people to be free and self express, etc)". We got into interesting discussions about Implicit rules vs Explicit rules: Culture vs Values vs Guidelines vs Rules and how they interact.
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I really like these posters for the Ten Principles of Burning Man.
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My friend Ben (and their partner, Ali) run an art project at Burning Nest called Troll Bar. There has been a Troll takeover at ELS.
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ELS Effigy happened early at 5pm. - It felt a bit weird it happening in the bright sun. But also the warmth made it feel a bit like being at Nowhere. Another strange dynamic is that it was open to the public, so there were loads of families and non burners there. It's obviously good to share our ceremonies and traditions with default world people, and the atmosphere was nice, but I think I'd have preferred something a little more intimate given I'd struggled to integrate with the ELS crowd as much as I'd have liked. Incredibly, my co-director of Burning Nest, Jeanne and I hadn't connected at the event prior to Effigy, but we found each other and got the obligatory selfie for the board Signal chat.
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Eindhoven
As part of our slow trip back to the UK, we're staying at a campsite near Eindhoven for a few days. This sunny Sunday, we went for a gorgeous walk in the nature around the area. There's a really nice lake nearby which we walked around. And I got to enjoy Hannah being excited at looking at animals.
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Amsterdam
We've arrived at a camper park about 12km outside Amsterdam. It's clean and well maintained, but a bit souless. I suppose that's what is actually useful here - it's a place to put one's van when visiting Amsterdam rather than an idyllic wilderness retreat. In the evening, we got the Metro into Amsterdam and wandered around looking at the city together. Our energy levels were low, so it wasn't a huge expedition, and after a bit of walking around, we found a really wonderful Italian restaurant called Santi & Santini (https://www.santiesantini.com). It was a 4.8 on google reviews and it was well deserved. We both had the Orecchiette al sugo di carne (Orecchiette, beef stew slow cooked for 8 hours in tomato sauce, pecorino cheese, celery, carrots, onion, laurer, red wine) - and it was really awesome comfort food - just what we both needed. Then, because it was late and we were tired, we treated ourselves to an Uber back to Ripley.
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We went for a little explore. There is a cool park just nearby with interesting scupltures, kids play activities, great trees and interesting landscaping.
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This evening we rented bikes and cycled into Amsterdam. It was about 12km in, but pretty flat, so we did it in about 35 minutes. When we got there we were both hungry so decided to grab a bite to eat and get a drink. We picked a random cafe. Hannah had her (not at all surprising) order of Fish and Chips and I had the worst steak I've ever ordered. After dinner we did a boat tour around the canals. I was hoping for one with some more narration, but we ended up on one that was more silly and boozy with minimal tour guide stuff. It was still fun, but I think I was after a little more mental nutrition especially since neither of us are drinking alcohol right now. Before heading back to Ripley, we took a detour to a coffee shop to pick up some supplies for the weekend. The cycle back was fun, but probably twice as far as we wanted given it was dark and cooling fast. Overall a really fun evening in Amsterdam
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