Yes, I know I'm a bit late writing this - but let me tell you about my first ever Gear n Dance and hear what I've learnt!
In October 2023 it was finally time for me to visit my first Gear 'n' Dance ever. The past few Gear 'n' Dances I've only gotten to watch the Instagram posts after, and even though I always thought it looked fun I was too scared to go. Luckily through the encouragement of a few people of the Fetish Meetup Hamburg I'm a part of I finally decided to go this time.
What is a "Gear and Dance"?
For those of you who don't know the Gear 'n' Dance here's a quick summary: Imagine a multi-dancefloor club filled to the brim. Now imagine everyone being in gear, pup hoods and fetish clothes - congrats you are now imagining Gear 'n' Dance.
Since April 2022 Puppy and Friends NRW has been organizing a Gear 'n' Dance event every quarter of the year in the German town of Bottrop, which is just north of Cologne. And October 2023 it was finally my time to go!
Of Tickets, Load and 503
Before anything else naturally I had to get tickets, which turned out to be harder than expected. The ticket store servers were not at all prepared to deal with the load of so many pups barking all at once, which lead to them almost immediately going offline at 18:00. I was lucky enough to have clicked the add to cart button in the few seconds they were up.
From there on out it was a 45 minute struggle of reloading and hoping my requests got through, and I actually managed to get my payment pushed through just before the servers were shut down and the sale was canceled. Luckily my ticket was still valid!
The second sale run went way smoother. I participated again to get a ticket for Puppy Nerro whose browser didn't play nice with the ticket store. This whole disaster caused a big revamp of the ticket store system, which is now way more stable and handled the January 2024 sale with ease.
...and where will I even sleep?
Now I had to move on to the next few questions: How do I get to Gear 'n' Dance, where will I sleep, and how will I get home?
The first two questions were easy to answer: Taking an ICE. There is regular train connections from Hamburg to Essen, and from Essen it's only a short ride on the S-Bahn to get to Bottrop. Now where to sleep is a different issue, as all hotels have been sold out pretty much as soon as they were possible to book. Luckily a good friend of mine recently moved to Essen, which is just one city over from Bottrop - should be easy to get there (caution: foreshadowing). So I asked her and she was immediately on board!
The Day of the Party
Getting to Bottrop was pretty straight forward: I took my ICE connection, missed my connection because of the Deutsche Bahn, took an IC and a Regional Train, arrived half an hour late; standard Deutsche Bahn behaviour. That's why you always add a buffer at the end of your Bahn journey.
When I got there I noticed I overestimated as I still had an hour to go until the party started, and I knew nobody there. At that point my social anxiety started spiking and I would have loved to just leave. Then Rex arrived, who was the first person I knew. We hugged and then I changed into my gear behind his car as to not get bottle-necked by the change-rooms inside. I then went back into the queue alone as I needed to take the line which lead to the cloakroom, as I still had my massive backpack with all my stuff with me. In the line I started socializing with other people and my social anxiety slowly went away.
After leaving my backpack at the cloakroom I walked along a narrow corridor, which I was told is normally an escape room, which lead me to a door into the main room and let me tell you - I was speechless.
In the main room it was so many gearheads and pups it was almost hard to get through - I had never seen so many based people in one place. 😜
This turned out to make it kinda hard to find people though, which meant I spent most of the party just aimlessly walking around and talking to random people, sometimes finding (and loosing) people I knew.
Two people I really wanted to meet were Innerwar and Foxy. And as luck had it I found them right at the photobox. After short "Hello"s we decided to take a few pictures together.
Photos with Innerwar and Foxy taken at MoNo Photograpy's Photobox
After that we went outside to talk some more. If you ever meet the two, definitely hit them up for a chat! They were both really nice and we talked quite a bit.
A bit later I went past the Photobox again and found a few SWAT-boys taking pictures, and since I was also SWAT-ty I asked to join, and they were cool with it so we took some pics together.
After that I went outside and finally found Nerro after looking for and failing to find him for the entire night up to then. After talking to him for a bit I met (a very tired) szeGeared for the first time IRL. We took a quick picture and parted ways again, but stayed in contact via chat, which was really good since szeGeared is a really nice person and through him I met a bunch of other awesome people.
Raider: No Way Home
After that I left Gear 'n' Dance and had the daunting task of somehow getting to Essen, which was harder than expected not only because of me walking in the wrong direction for a kilometer, but also because the S-Bahn had stopped operation, and was replaced by a bus. This meant I only got to my friend at 6:00. So next time I'll be taking a hotel.
Getting home from my ICE was equally difficult, as through a delay there was no connections to my hometown anymore which meant I had to walk the 6 km from the nearest serviced station to my home. This walk though gave me time to reflect on the great time I had and the new friends I made.
To new Horizons
If I could give you one tip if you ever attend Gear 'n' Dance it would be this:
You will definitely find me at the next Gear 'n' Dance again, and I can only recommend you should try to be there too! It was a great experience and I suffer knowing I have to wait a quarter of a year until there's the next one.
Sure there were some hickups, like the payment system crashing half way through the event, but overall the Gear 'n' Dance was an amazing event I can only recommend.