Hello from East Ridge, TN

Hello from East Ridge, TN

Monday Evening October 17, 2011 (fifth travelogue of this trip).

We are in East Ridge, TN at the Camp Jordan Park (map). This is the site of the Bus Conversions Magazine bus rally. The rally is over, and we are the only ones left in the park from the rally. Friday was “arrival day” (may folks arrived Thursday) and the majority of activities took place over the weekend.

Even though we moved from Rossville, GA to East Ridge, TN the trip was only three miles. Indeed, when we moved here, I did not hook up the truck. I put the bike in the bus and then rode it back to the shop so that I could pick up the service truck.

The rally turned out to be a compromised event. The editor had over 100 people respond that they would attend the rally and started planning accordingly. It turned out that only about a third of that number actually registered and that caused a significant scaling back of the activities. The events had to be moved from the large arena building to an open-air pavilion and an outdoor stage. That was not all that bad, as the weather was quite nice and the outdoor locations were not a problem.

A friend of ours, helped the editor arrange the music for the event. Saturday night had three good entertainer individuals/groups. Two of the Sunday groups were good, but the other two went way overboard with religious music and preaching to the audience. We stayed through the full program the first night, but left early the second night. Both nights the “crowd” was embarrassingly small. When we left last night, we were the last ones left in the audience, but we heard them continue to play.

There was also what sounded like good gospel music Sunday afternoon, but they scheduled the technical sessions at the same time. That resulted in only a handful of folks in the audience.

I did three seminars and they had reasonably good attendance, given the small number of people here. Because of the tight schedule, and all of the compromises, there was no vendor area, nor any time to set up a formal display. This morning I set up some fire extinguishers and ended up selling several. When we attend a bus rally, our sales expectations are not very high. Just the nature of the beast. Most of the folks know me and those that want to buy product don't wait for the rally.

Pat only had three ladies in her session, but they were all friends and they had a good time. She got a couple of good orders.

Our regret when we are vendors and doing seminars, is that we don't get as much time as we would like to talk to old friends and meet new ones. However, we made the most of the time we had and got to talk to a lot of folks.

The technical sessions associated with the rally did not draw registrations. It could have been because of the cost, or extended schedule (mine was scheduled for this Friday). As a result, they canceled the remaining sessions. That leaves us with some time to do a bit of sightseeing before we leave. Not sure what we will do, but the first order of business is to relax tomorrow. We came in several days early to help with the rally. Unfortunately, there were almost no other volunteers, so we have been running the whole week.

That is all for now.