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.

Hello from Rossville, GA

Hello from Rossville, GA

Wednesday Evening October 12, 2011 (fourth travelogue of this trip).

When I started this blog, we were parked at the Choo Choo Garage in Rossville, GA (map). This afternoon we moved to a different state (trip was all of three miles), but that will be the subject of our next post.

The Choo Choo Garage is a pretty famous bus repair shop and the site of the Bus Conversion Magazine Workshops. I helped with the first two workshops – mostly as a gopher and video camera operator. However, being me, I just had to jump in and “contribute” to the workshops {grin}. Indeed, the two presenters and I made a pretty good team as each of us came from different backgrounds.

Now let's catch up on some of the events since our last post. Last Friday we took an unbelievable tour of the KitchenAid factory in Greenville. This is the only plant in the world to manufactures the counter-top or “stand” mixer. When I say only, that is significant. They export this type of mixer all over the world including China – from this plant! The pride of the workers is amazing. But, even more amazing were the huge number of workstations hand assembling components for the mixer. This is work that is typically sent overseas, but KitchenAid has staunchly refused to ship jobs overseas (Tom are you reading this). Indeed they are working towards bringing jobs back to the US on some of their other product line.

They charge $5 for the tour but it is well worth it. The lady that gave us our personal tour was a great ambassador for the company. She took us all over the huge plant and had knowledgeable answers for almost all of my technical questions. Probably the most impressive part of the tour was seeing all of the beautiful colors that are used for the mixers.

Saturday we left Greenville and drove to Lexington, KY and stayed at a Wal Mart. Our main reason for stopping there was to visit with a customer and his wife. Bill and I have grown to be great friends over the years and he has offered great support when I was struggling with some issues a few years ago. I have told some of you about Bill - he was a government psychologist who evaluated many major criminals including John Gotti and the unabomber. I have talked to Bill on the phone many times on many subjects but had never gotten to meet him.

He was as fun in person as he is on the phone and his wife Genie is a great lady. We had a lot of fun looking at the Prevost that he converted himself - a beautiful bus. Bill and I also went to visit another busnut who is working on an Eagle with 4 slide outs. It has an amazing amount of great work. While Bill and I were looking at buses, Pat and Genie went to a horse race. In the evening we toured around areas where there were beautiful horse farms. Lexington is in the heart of the horse country that Kentucky is so famous for.

Sunday we drove from Lexington to Rossville and met with Mike Sullivan who is the president of the Bus Conversion Magazine and who has almost single-handily arrange the Bus Conversions Rally. Monday we helped Mike with some of the details. Yesterday and today were two of the workshops. There will be one more this week and several next week including the welding workshop that I will co-present.

The color of the trees on the drive down from Greenville were gorgeous. As we got closer to Chattanooga, we noted that the colors were not as great. We are quite a bit south of the areas with the best colors and we will probably see the trees change here in the next week or so.

That is all for now.