It's traditional to have periodic fencing camps and they're usually held in the summer to prepare the younger athletes for the Summer National competitions. As some of us have noted, us older fencers aren't exactly well suited to the hours of physical conditioning exercises and other routines normally associated with fencing camps. More, most of us don't get the summer off to attend camps.

Thus, when Mr. Ma announced plans to include a Veteran component in his late June camp, some of us started talking in e-mail and the next thing I knew, a 3-day amp was scheduled over the Memorial Day weekend.

I flew out Friday morning, picked up a rental car, and checked into the hotel room before driving around to insure I could find the place on Saturday.

Saturday, I was the first person there and waiting when Jane arrived with Wang Yung. [I am a member of the Vince Lombardi school of timekeeping. If you are not ten minutes early, you're ten minutes late.]

Mr. Ma's Cherry Tree location is in a strip mall next to a Dunkin Donuts. As someone who is used to not having a permanent home, it looked wonderful. We checked in and worked out as other fencers began arriving and then we moved to the back strips as a class arrived and used the front strips. In the middle of the day, we took a break and went to a nice place whose name I've forgotten that appeared to be a large store with multiple self-service mini-restaurants and we purchased food and went upstairs to a nice seating area to eat and talk about fencing and USFA politics. Afterwards, we returned to Mr. Ma's, where we resumed fencing and working around other classes and thus fenced not only with each other but with whoever was available until about 5pm, when we went our separate ways to clean up with some of us making arrangements to meet for dinner.

We met at On The Border about 1830 hours and had a great dinner and nice discussion about fencing-related and non-fencing related topics. Wang and I discussed government outsourcing (having both been affected by it) and multiple other topics.

It was nice to have a chance to socialize with fencers I usually see only briefly at competitions. The usual conversations are something like: Hi, want to fence? Thanks. Good luck, but not against me. Congratulations. See you next time. it was nice to learn about what some of us did off the strip.