Talk around the locals appears to be that the council missed a trick in not insuring the proposed Record Skinny Dip attempt.

And the local Aqua Park, I learn, was going to be approached to throw open its doors exclusively for the use of naturists today, another plan that foundered.

So a ‘weekend’ of events was ultimately reduced to the fun run, with the local radio station (English speaking station for the ex-pat community) now giving it great publicity and support.

It’s such a shame that much of this fell through. I’ve only been in town three days and already I can see the enormous potential for the local council throwing its weight behind the events and showing the area off positively to a global audience.

Note: Vera Playa is unique amongst all of the naturist resorts I’ve visited in being totally ‘open’ to the public. Anyone could drive down from the main road and onto the street shown in the photograph. I’ve walked naked from our apartment to the beach on ‘public’ streets, and the police have driven by without taking any notice. Here, that is normal custom.

Hopefully Ella, I and our families will be able to return next year for a full timetable of naturist events.

Pookes

How brave are we? Hmmm…we like to ‘talk the talk’ here on SLN, but would we consider ‘walking the walk’?

After a morning’s sunbathing and swimming on the beach yesterday, we repaired to Ella’s apartment while her children had a siesta. In the afternoon, we all made our way down to the pool, where Ella’s husband shot some video. A bit difficult for him for a time, as ‘the RL Mr Pookes’ and I apparently kept wandering into shot, oblivious to his presence. We said we didn’t care being in the video, as long as we got a copy of it! 🙂

So last night we had dinner in a lovely restaurant, and then made our way back to their apartment (children in bed, exhausted by this time) and sat on the balcony drinking wine. Talk, inevitably, turned to SL. At least, it did for Ella and I, while our respective husbands took themselves off to a nearby bar, where nudity is permitted, to share a few drinks.

As the wine flowed, we got to a point in the discussion where we were asking ourselves the question ‘we do like to rattle on about the naturist lifestyle, but would we be brave enough to ‘walk the walk’ on our own blog?’

‘Oh yes’, we said after a bottle of wine.

‘Oh no’, we said this morning over coffee as the sun came up over the Med.

And then we said….

‘….oh, who cares?’ So we’re reviewing Mr. Keng’s footage, and selecting some images from the video.

I’m not going to promise that we’re going to show crystal clear, full frontal shots (we aren’t actually posing for the camera anyway, it’s us as we’re enjoying the pool, naturally).

But if we’re going to be champions for naturism, then surely we have to be seen to be active naturists. Yes?

Ella returns home on Wednesday, I’m here until Saturday, but we’ll certainly go through the footage, choose a few shots and…maybe, gulp, just maybe, allow ourselves to face the camera and bare all for SLN! I’ll leave you to guess which photo is Ella, and which is me. I think I’ve added a poll, so you can vote on who you think each of us in the photos are. (Be patient if this has gone wrong, I’ve never added a poll to a post before, and Ella just shook her head when I asked her how to do it).

Pookes

Edited to add: Our husbands, unsurprisingly, like the whole idea of this post 🙂 I wonder why? 🙂 So now we’ve got a bit of a Vera Playa meme going on between now and Wednesday (although ‘the RL Mr Pookes’ wants it to continue beyond then!) to see if we can get up numerous ‘us’ – i.e. Ella and myself- photos which show everything without actually identifying ourselves. And as Ella has already pointed out in ‘comments’, I’ve tagged the photos incorrectly, so no poll is necessary. Ella’s the one in the bottom pic, showing her bottom, and I’m in the top shot, showing mine and a bit of side boob!

You’ll know, if you’ve read SLN for any length of time, that Ella maintains ‘alts’ for the times when she needs to take photos in a hurry and there’s no Harry or Diane around to do it, and she also might want to sport a slightly different ‘look’ (on her female alt). Speaking to her yesterday it appears that this is something of a historical thing with Ella, when she made her alts she didn’t actually know you could save entire outfits including skins, hair etc, and do an instantaneous switch.

Because you can save a whole outfit I’ve never had an ‘alt’ (and regular readers will know just how often I change hairstyles in SL) but if I’m going to be editing for a while I thought I did at least require a male alt that could be pressed into action without oddly looking like ‘Eva Pookes’ was online and looking like a man.

I was up early this morning, so I decided to set up a male alt for when I might need ‘him’. And I decided to do him on a zero budget and still make him not look like a newbie.

So…

…meet Mr. Pookes! (and no, he’s not being run by the still slumbering RL Mr. Pookes who is resolutely disinterested in SL).

Working from a generic SL male avatar, I went to JStyle which offers excellent male skins for L$0 and picked a few up. From there, to Midnight Lotus where I picked up their free, non-functioning (i.e. it doesn’t grow erect, urinate or ejaculate) ‘Chrome Edition’ penis (top pic). And if you are going to be in situations where an erection is necessary -this avi certainly won’t- then the free mesh penis we blogged a couple of weeks ago (bottom pic) is your best option at Juicy Lips. To this, I added an excellent free male AO from the marketplace, called ‘Tuty’s free male AO’ (there’s also equally good female versions) and hey presto! Good looking male avatar for L$0.

As he’s under 30 days old the only thing I don’t like about him is his hair, but Sweet Hairs offer a free gift for female hair, so I’ll try and pick one up later on if I can see one that looks suitably male.

There you have it. A good looking male and not a linden dollar spent.

Pookes

Did I miss anything while I was on vacation?

It rather looks like I’ve missed Ella’s brief step-down from the editor’s chair, for one, and Pookes’ elevation to it.

I’m back from my holidays, and I’m now thinking about getting a few new photo-sessions set up, with one or two new or new-ish models.

I did have dinner with Eileen on the Nude Haven sim, at Corleone’s restaurant, to discuss locations.

More new photos very soon.

Harry

I’ve decided that, rather than call this a ‘postcard from Spain’, I’d adopt the ‘Dia sin rope’ title for it, although strictly speaking it’s a ‘fin de semana’ (end of the week…or ‘weekend’) that we, Ella and I, are here for.

Ella and I both flew into Spain yesterday, Friday, to different airports and we met up last night. In the end, ‘old hand’ to this part of the world Ella, who arrived before I did, was called to help us out locate the place we’re staying at, as we got horribly lost 🙂 We didn’t end up in Santander….just half a mile from where we were supposed to be…but no wiser as to how to narrow it down from there.

So…I called Ella and asked if she could help. Having identified where it was we were, she provided directions until she had pretty much talked us to the front gate of our accommodation, by which time she and her husband and walked from their apartment and were standing there, Ella on the phone, speaking to us as we arrived 🙂

‘If that’s you in the white Fiat, that’s us waving at you’, she said ‘and if it’s not you then we look pretty stupid right now’.

Fortunately it was us and….wow…Ella looks exceptionally close, in real life, to her avatar. We agreed to meet up the following morning, Saturday. Initially the plan was for our respective partners to run in the naked fun run, as both are joggers, but the weather forecast we’d known of days beforehand had been encouraging both to withdraw their participation as being just too hot for running. In the end, though, they did ‘run’, more of a walk than anything else, but it allowed Mr Pookes to get to know Mr. Keng and for Mr. Keng to show my man some of the landmarks as they semi-jogged the route (and come in well down the field). While they did so, Ella and I walked the short distance from the start line to the finish line, order some coffee from the Puntonat chiringuito, and spent our own time getting to know each other face to face, despite having IM’ed and emailed and texted and called each other previously. By the way…our respective husbands are in the selection of photos below, but I won’t be drawing an arrow at each of them 🙂 And yes, I can see Ella too. 🙂

Other than finding it difficult to remember that we weren’t ‘Ella’ and ‘Pookes’ on this meeting, we already felt that we knew each other really well, and the weekend therefore got off to a great start.

What we’d originally booked for, the ‘Guinness Book of Records Skinny Dip’, won’t be taking place but you’ll be pleased to learn the ‘dia sin ropa’, where beachgoers across Spain, not just here, are encouraged to go nude or, at the very least, be supportive of the idea.

We shall be making our way down there tomorrow and I’ll report back. In the meantime it has become ridiculously hot and humid. If you imagine sitting on the bottom shelf of a sauna, you’ll get some indication of what our apartment feels like. Meeting up with Mr & Mrs Keng and their children later for dinner. I sincerely hope it has cooled a little by then.

Pookes. 

SL slows down a bit in summer months, I’ve always found. Players are on vacation, and it’s a time for outdoors, not the computer, so there does tend to be less activity in world. Of course, there’s the flip side where the virtual slows down and real world naturism is much more in evidence.

The next few posts, spread around the staff, are me playing catch up on recent and forthcoming RL naturist (or at least nude, to varying degrees) events. Later tonight I hope to have the first of these, one of Barbara’s sporadic but always exceptionally considered posts, published. Following on from that Pookes has an article on the various northern hemisphere naked bike rides going on around the world right now (at least, the northern hemisphere) and I’ll be popping up a couple of photo galleries of recent work by Harry and Diane. They may be tonight, they may be tomorrow. After that, I’m taking a break from SL and from blogging. No, I’m not losing interest. I feel that we have to improve what we do all the time, and therefore I’m going to be working behind the scenes for much of the summer in a ‘kind of related’ manner. Firstly, I’ve always wanted to build, so I would like to devote some time to learning some of those skills, as I think that it would benefit us in the long term to do some of our own props, poses, sarongs…. Quite how successful this will be remains to be seen, but I’m going to fill what was my ‘SL time’ with things like that and also seeing if we can upgrade and revamp the site. So some web-page skills need to be learnt too.

I also have two growing children at home here for their summer holidays…and also accompanying us to Spain next week! So my first priority will be to them until we slip back into a schooldays routine in September. From tomorrow, Pookes will be helming the SL editor’s chair until mid-September, and there will be a slight sea-change in the way things get done around here! 🙂 You never know…she may be so good at it that I can sack myself! 🙂

Of course, Pookes and I are meeting up in Spain, in real life, next week, which is quite exciting. After that I know she has some ideas of her own about how we move forward with SLN, but she can provide the details on that during her tenure in the editor’s chair.

I set up the ‘Moonella’ group a couple of years back, with plans for it, but without ever doing anything with it. My intention is that this will be more active, free gifts etc, in the autumn (fall, North American cousins) and maybe have SLN T shirts or things like that made available for members. Depending on how good I get to be as a builder or designer, I’ll maybe throw some stuff at you via that source.

We’ve also wanted to do SLN as an in world, readable ‘newspaper’, and how to do this will be another of the things on my ‘to do’ list. I’ve been wanting to break out of the formats we have currently (and the Issuu online and downloadable versions of SLN partially took us in that direction) so simply the options available to us are going to have to be examined, explored and experimented with.

So…I’ll catch you in the autumn, more or less. Yes, my name may tagline the odd post, but where it does it will be pointing you at some experiment or other that I’m trying out, in world and externally.

Enjoy your summer, wherever you are, and I’ll leave you in Pookes’ more than capable hands.

Ella

I confess that I lost my SL mojo when we got back from Spain. It happens from time to time with SL, and I’ve had that experience before and expect to have it again in the future. So rather than force it, I stepped away from it for about two weeks now. It’s like writer’s block. If you force it, it makes things worse. So the best option was to abandon ship for a couple of weeks and then see how it was going.

What usually ‘cures’ me of it is seeing something I desperately want on the SL blog lists, and it re-fires my imagination. Anyway, it does no harm to take periods off and freshen up accordingly.

Is there a stockpile of articles? Yes, there are! 🙂 I asked the others not to post them, and let us all take a step back for a while and think about where we take SLN from here. Emails & IMs are now beginning to be exchanged on this matter, and we shall see where SLN is going in the coming months. I really don’t plan to do anything radical before September, though. SL gets quieter in summer, as people, players, bloggers take vacations, and so we’ll hold back on any seismic change until then.

On with the show! Articles to begin getting published over the next few days, I think, and another few days away at the back end of next week.

Ella

SLN returns soon. The builders are in, adding an extension ‘office’ to our home, and the place is in chaos.

Ella