The Annapolis Sailboat Show is Ready!

I swear we aren’t asking for sympathy, we are just having a darn good time doing very hard work. It's just like mountain bike riding; you are bruised and scraped, but exhilarated. Reinhart worked 36 hours and I worked 35 hours over three days (Monday-Wednesday). Monday and Tuesday were definitely the hardest, starting at dawn and working well into dark. Wednesday wasn’t so bad and we clocked out (with the 35 and 36 hours), and then we immediately got hired to unload a vendor’s van and trailer. Reinhart also backed the guy’s large trailer out of the show with such grace and accuracy as to attract the accolades of surrounding vendors. I think if we were willing to work 16 hours a day, we could just keep unloading trailers and toting boxes for overwrought vendors for $20 an hour. We are so happy we are at a dock and can enjoy extra long hot showers and air conditioning when we get in at night. We also really appreciate the meals over the past three days, since we never have the time to eat breakfast before we leave and don’t have the energy to make dinner once we get home; but that’s over now, and we are on our own for meals for the next 5 days.

Reinhart has fallen into a trio of boat show workers that have reputation for doing anything very quickly without complaint. He even got a six-pack of Corona today from a vendor as a tip. They are letting him do all the driving and he has gotten the same reputation he has in NC for driving "sporty"…but he can maneuver the golf carts around the boat show traffic with such speed that he doesn’t even hear the vendors cussing in his wake. I’ve got the reputation of being willing to run any message, package, or materials anywhere in the boat show; I think they see me as highly energetic, when the truth is my hands are so cut up from building tents on Monday and Tuesday that I was happy as a lark to stick to leg work on Wednesday. I was also given a compliment on my decorating abilities in a little corner of the boat show.

But now the furious work of building the show is almost over. We start at 7 am tomorrow for the last touches and then the show opens at 10 am. We’ll both be working at the same gate of the show (yacht basin, near the bridge), and I guess our jobs will be to make sure folks have tickets, people-traffic is flowing safely and efficiently, and vendors are happy.