I left home on Thursday morning and arrived at the site about 1:10 pm to pick up my credentials and learn the route for the shuttle carts this year. I didn't make reservations early enough to get into any of my preferred lodgings. I discovered that I'd booked a room at what probably was a nice place... thirty years ago. I can only call it a "Notel" since it's obvious that some of the rooms were rented out by the hour... :roll:
...I'm going to make my reservations for next year within the next few weeks!
If any of you nice folks took advantage of the shuttles, you would have had a 1:63 chance of riding with me since I only spent about 2 hours shopping and looking around before spending the rest of Friday, Saturday and Sunday driving. I have to say that it's more fun than bumper cars!
I got to meet a lot of really nice people, and enjoyed hearing their impressions of the event. While the ground asphalt in the flea market was a huge improvement, the recommendation for next year is to make the paths wider by about 10 feet, as the vehicles straddled the 'paved area' and really churned things up in front of the vendor's areas.
I really enjoyed helping folks find their cars in the afternoon and they surely appreciated that we did our best to get them all the way to their cars, especially if they had a lot of goodies to lug along. I had to just smile when I asked them what car we're looking for and they would say something like "I'm in a black SUV. The one with an antenna on it." Gee that narrows down the search to only about 400 vehicles!
The rain this year was nowhere near as bad as last year. I got smarter and bought a rain poncho at Walmart on Thursday evening. That was the best $1.97 I've spent in a long time. :wink:
Oh, and the traffic was so much better this year, largely because most of the on-site parking was reserved for ADA, and the Sheriff's Department controlled the traffic much more effectively. Kudo's to them!