{"id":95,"date":"2011-10-18T00:19:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-18T00:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beltguy.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/18\/hello-from-east-ridge-tn\/"},"modified":"2011-10-18T00:19:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-18T00:19:00","slug":"hello-from-east-ridge-tn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"Hello from East Ridge, TN"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\nHello from East Ridge, TN<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nMonday Evening October
\n17, 2011 (fifth travelogue of this trip).<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nWe are in East Ridge, TN
\nat the Camp Jordan Park (map)<\/a><\/u>.
\n This is the site of the Bus Conversions Magazine bus rally. The
\nrally is over, and we are the only ones left in the park from the
\nrally. Friday was \u201carrival day\u201d (may folks arrived Thursday) and
\nthe majority of activities took place over the weekend.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nEven though we moved from
\nRossville, GA to East Ridge, TN the trip was only three miles.
\nIndeed, when we moved here, I did not hook up the truck. I put the
\nbike in the bus and then rode it back to the shop so that I could
\npick up the service truck.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nThe rally turned out to be
\na compromised event. The editor had over 100 people respond that
\nthey would attend the rally and started planning accordingly. It
\nturned out that only about a third of that number actually registered
\nand that caused a significant scaling back of the activities. The
\nevents had to be moved from the large arena building to an open-air
\npavilion and an outdoor stage. That was not all that bad, as the
\nweather was quite nice and the outdoor locations were not a problem.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nA friend of ours, helped
\nthe editor arrange the music for the event. Saturday night had three
\ngood entertainer individuals\/groups. Two of the Sunday groups were
\ngood, but the other two went way overboard with religious music and
\npreaching to the audience. We stayed through the
\nfull program the first night, but left early the second night. Both
\nnights the \u201ccrowd\u201d was embarrassingly small. When we left last
\nnight, we were the last ones left in the audience, but we heard them
\ncontinue to play.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nThere was also what
\nsounded like good gospel music Sunday afternoon, but they scheduled
\nthe technical sessions at the same time. That resulted in only a
\nhandful of folks in the audience.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nI did three seminars and they had reasonably good attendance, given the small
\nnumber of people here. Because of the tight schedule, and all of the
\ncompromises, there was no vendor area, nor any time to set up a
\nformal display. This morning I set up some fire extinguishers and
\nended up selling several. When we attend a bus rally, our sales
\nexpectations are not very high. Just the nature of the beast. Most
\nof the folks know me and those that want to buy product don’t wait
\nfor the rally.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nPat only had three ladies
\nin her session, but they were all friends and they had a good time.
\nShe got a couple of good orders.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nOur regret when we are
\nvendors and doing seminars, is that we don’t get as much time as we
\nwould like to talk to old friends and meet new ones. However, we
\nmade the most of the time we had and got to talk to a lot of folks.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nThe technical sessions
\nassociated with the rally did not draw registrations. It could have been
\nbecause of the cost, or extended schedule (mine was scheduled for
\nthis Friday). As a result, they canceled the remaining sessions.
\nThat leaves us with some time to do a bit of sightseeing before we
\nleave. Not sure what we will do, but the first order of business is
\nto relax tomorrow. We came in several days early to help with the
\nrally. Unfortunately, there were almost no other volunteers, so we
\nhave been running the whole week.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nThat is all for now.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beltguy.com\/Travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}