Thursday, October 9, 2008

2008 Big Sur Jade Festival Pt. 1

This year's 17th Annual Big Sur Jade Festival was going to be my third consecutive one and I went into it with high hopes of making a breakthrough despite the current economic distress.

Yes, I'm a dreamer alright!

For the first time in the now three years I've been to this festival wildfire played a notable roll. The Chalk Fire started Saturday, September 27th, and continues to burn in the mountains behind where the Jade Festival is being held. It is now mostly quiet but until last weekend when it rained it was moving down the coast and threatened to cause the cancellation or postponement of the Jade Festival.

Given that this is a three day event, today, Thursday, October 9th, was the set-up day.
There was no need to rush as the venue is the Pacific Valley School and we needed to wait until school let out for the Columbus Day weekend.

I headed up there a bit after my business partner Mike Lyons left Atascadero for it as I had more to do to get loaded up and he ought to get there first as the booth is in his name as he is the one who makes our arrangements for it.

I did get up there safe and sound without driving over the side of the cliffs and without having any notable anxiety attacks in spite of the fact I utterly hate the two really high spots on Highway 1 just south and just north of Salmon Creek.

At least during the previous two Jade Festivals I had my iPod actually functioning and was able to listen to my music to distract me in the scary sections of road but not this year unfortunately but on this day I made do without it.

When I did arrive there I was surprised at how many booth spots were still empty from vendors not having arrived yet.

Mike was parked next to our spot but not much was on it yet so I had missed nothing of the set-up which was nice.

Mike and I did set up our tables and my Easy-Up and I placed most of the non-inventory elements of what composes our booth such as display and packaging materials and some not-that-valuable buckets of material like abalone shells and such.
However, we both elected to not bring most of our inventory until tomorrow morning as we felt no reason to needlessly leave our stuff unattended overnight before the show even began.

Both before and after we did our work we visited with our friends amongst the dealers such as Keith Olivas and Ernie DeFever and Jack Daggett and Kirk Brock and Mike Berklio and others.

It was nice to get caught up with friends and find out what was new with them and hear the latest scuttle-butt.

After arriving mid-afternoon I stayed a couple of hours and left before it would get dark on me driving home.

Kimmer

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