This is our third trip to the area in 6 weeks.  Not many choices this weekend.  Stopped by the Watsonville Strawberry Festival and didn't appear to be as bad as I have heard.  Weather was fair with some sun.  The show was located on four streets surrounding a park.  Perhaps 80 vendors and maybe 15 food booths.  I dropped by during the middle part of Saturday afternoon and they had a fair amount of people  and there appeared to be some life to the show.  Spoke to a number of vendors and one said he was doing good, but the other's claimed 'not good at all.'  There were several 'customers' looking around  in many booths but I really can't figure how things are going.  Heard that people did have problems setting up on the one street with booths back to back.  There were three food booths selling Philly Cheesesteaks and I picked up one for $7.  Gigantic roll, loads of meat with some peppers and onions with cheese squirted on top.  Not bad, actually.

 

I did not see any advertising for the event (Strawberry Festival) anywhere.  Nothing on the highway.  Nothing downtown.  Nothing anywhere.  I actually went to a different event that I thought was the Strawberry Festival that had around 40 booths.  The guy told me that it wasn't and pointed to his left 'It's over there somewhere.'  I drove in that direction until I saw people parking their cars on the streets and getting out and walking like they were headed for a festival.  I went down that street and found the event.  No %$%*#ing signs, man.  What is wrong.  Now, on to the Morro Bay Street Faire.

 

STAYING AT MOTEL 6 in Atascadero aka  Bedbug Motel.  First thing I did was to roll back the sheets and blankets to look for them.  A friend of mine spotted them during his stay here last year.  This looks like this might be one of the noisiest Motel 6's I have ever stayed at.  We were in Paso Robles a couple weeks ago and it was very quiet.  Not like that over here.  Walls are paper-thin.  Slamming doors.  TVs turned up here very loudly.  Sounds of banging drums.  Elephants trampeding above us.  Horses running up the stairs. 

 

August 1.  This is the third time I have driven down here for this annual event.  I have been up in Oregon on this weekend for the past several years.  We arrived on location at 6:10am.  For some reason I expected to see a lot people setting up at this time.  Oh oh.  Only a few there.  I found out my space number and drove my van over to where it was located on Main St. and began unloading. 

 

We took a couple hours to set up, as usual.  Others began arriving.  The weather was a bit cool and it was overcast and that was continue through most of the day.  They had about a half block of booths on Main Street and they were all in quads as opposed to along the curb.  They said that they started doing this a few year's ago and I agreed with them that it was an excellent idea because everybody get two sides open.  There were pretty large spaces in between also.  There were also 3 blocks of booths along Morro Bay Blvd which ran perpendicular to Main.

 

PEOPLE JUST STARTED STRAGGLING in between 9-10:00 and we never really had one of those huge overwhelming crowds.  Just people strolling down the street.  My sales were okay until 1:00pm and then they dwindled and became rather sporadic the remainder of the day, which continued to be cloudy and breezy.  We were facing the Bay, so we caught the wind.

 

ONE THING THAT I NOTICED is that I received a bunch of twenty-dollar bills before 1:00 and after that, I received none; only tens, fives and ones.  So, it looks like a lot of the people were probably making cheap purchases with their 'twenties' and were given change during the afternoon and that is what I received.

 

I KNEW THAT SALES were going to be low because I do not do good in this kind of weather.  People do stay bundled up with their hands in their pockets.  I met a number of groups of tourists from SOCAL and they said that they loved this weather because it had been so hot down there in the L.A. Basin.  As for me, I want to see 70 degree temps here in Morro Bay.

 

SOMETHING STRANGE happened.  Around noontime, these two kids who were around 10-11 year's old approached me in my booth and told me that they found somebody's cell phone on my table.  They gave it to me.  Apparently, one of my customer's (?) had left it there.  Looked like a generic AT&T LG phone that they had given out with a subscription to their surface.  Too bad it wasn't an I-phone.

 

So, I took the phone and began playing around with it with the intention of calling one of the numbers on their and ask if anybody knows this person.  As I did that, I looked up and saw those two kids standing close together watching me carefully.  They pretended like they weren't and glanced away when I looked at them.  I looked at the phone and then quickly glanced at them again.  They were staring at me.  This is weird.  Were these kid's from Mars or some other planet?  Were they the FBI?  They were just freaking strange.  They then walked away and five minutes later they re-appeared. Whoa. Eerie.  Twilight Zone stuff.  Actually, I didn't see them walk over; they just popped in, just like that!

 

Maybe this is their secret gizmo and they need it to beam back up to the planet, Zanthos.  I pointed at them with it and pushed one of the buttons.  Nothing happened.  They just stood there.  They are not getting it back from me. They looked away quickly pretending not to be watching me.  I pointed the phone directly at them and pushed another button and just at that time, they turned their heads quickly to look at me.  This is only a cell phone, what the hell do you expect.  These two kids were very strange; just kept looking at me and watching every movement I made with the phone.

 

  Finally they left.  I tried calling some of the people on the phone and had a few 'no answers, etc.'  I reached a couple of them and asked if they had caller id and could recognize the number.  No good. Didn't work.  You know, one time I did this in Grover Beach last fall and it worked fine.  Got hold of one of the lady's friends who contacted the owner and she showed up 10 minutes later to claim the phone.

 

I tried calling one of the numbers that said 'Dad' and I wasn't able to get a connection.  I was getting frustrated and was ready to turn the phone over to the promoter of the event.  It's a cheap generic phone, so I had invested enough time in it.  I called up another guy who recognized the number and told me that it was his old phone.  They had been at a lake awhile back and he had lost his phone there and he was shocked when I called him.  I guess he had previously tried calling this phone and that is why his new number showed up.  So, I told him that I would mail his phone to him and he just has to reimburse me for postage.  No big deal.

 

Now, we go back to the kid's.  I began to understand why they were staring at me.  Because they probably had found this guy's phone at that lake and had been carrying it around since.  They decided that they didn't want it, so they placed the phone on the table when I wasn't looking and pretended to have found it.  What else.  I am pretty much dumbfounded on this.  You know, to tell you the truth.  Now that I think about it and envision them in my mind, they kind of look like The Beaver and Larry Mondello.  Somehow, they must have entered a time warp while filming the TV show and ended up here in Morro Bay and they were figuring how they were going to get back.  This is a wild story, huh.  I guess that they left and headed over to the bridge to spit in the water.  You should see some of these crazy ass dreams I have been having lately.

 

Follow up:  My wife wrapped up the phone and we sent it on its way today, Monday, August 2, light year 2010.

 

BACK TO REALITY.  All in all, this was an excellent show and I think that these people did great.  There were 4 food booths there along with a kettle korn.  Maybe around 100 vendors there. The set up was terrific and I have absolutely no complaints.  I rank them up there with the Ceres Chamber of Commerce and a number of other promoter's that do it right.  However, you can not do anything about this weather.  You can be out there in Paso Robles and the 101 and you'll see temperatures around 108 degrees.  You drive 20 miles (or less) to the coast and its more than 50 degrees cooler and you can be blanketed by fog.  It's rough doing shows out there.  My best sales come during sunny weather and moderate temperatures. I don't think I saw anybody selling sunglasses.  I wonder why. It appears to me that a good number of the vendor's did not 'Faire' so well.  They had a good amount of booths and a decent number of people/tourists around, but the economy has taken a licking and it's been obvious for the past 2-3 years that spending habits have changed.  Unfortunately, my lack of good success at this event made up my mind about coming here for the Morro Bay Harbor Festival in October.  With sales like this in this area, I can not afford to come.  It's a wonderful area with great people and a bunch of tourists but we are talking dollars and cents.

 

I AM QUITE CURIOUS to have counted 27 empty spaces throughout the show. There were large pockets of areas with no vendors.  I was told that the even was a sell out and individuals were able to procure spaces through cancellations.  Looks like this is one of those shows where the promoter may have placed too much faith in vendors who said they would pay when they got there.  I don't know.  I just don't know.  If this be the case, then they people are ruining things for the rest of us and they need to be beheaded.

 

I HAD MY FIRST CUP OF COFFEE in three year's from this place just around the corner.  I had walked by their early in the morning after first parking my van near there and the aroma was overbearing.  Man, I could not resist.  I purchased a large cup of coffee for my wife and I to share and I put in some milk and sugar and it was really pretty darn good.  I've really given up coffee because of high blood pressure, but I decided to try just one.  It was good.  Damn good.

 

AROUND 3:00pm, I hopped in my van and decided to take a drive down to the Wharf to get some Halibut and Chips from Giovanni's.  I pulled into their parking lot and I looked at the line.  There were over 30 people in that line.  How the hell can they stand there in this freaking weather.  It's cold.  Most of them had on heavy sweaters and coats.  Come on people.  No way was I going to stand in that darn like.  That's at least one hour or more.  I stood in a line of 15 people 5 year's ago and it took 45 minutes.  Uh uh uh.  I drove back to the parking lot near my booth and wanted to forget about it.  My wife were both hungry and we were dissapointed.  I decided to try again at 4:00 and drove back over there and saw around 15 people in the line.  No.  I wanted to get out of Morro Bay in a hurry and it was just about time to start packing up.  That is what we did when I drove back.  I backed up the van to the sidewalk and we started packing and loading up the van.

 

AS WE HEADED HOME, we dropped by the Shell Station at the end of Highway 41 in Atascadero and gassed up.  Drove across the street to A&W Root Beer and got a couple double-cheeseburgers and a large Root Beer for myself and a Float for my wife and we were on our way home.  80 mph most of the way but did see a good (whoops, bad) number of CHIPies on the 101, so had to slow down.  Hit 5 miles of traffic on the curves (chicken shits!!) before San Juan Bautista and ended up getting home at 9:20.  Not bad.  There was no reason for the traffic backup as people tend to slow down around those curves.  Rough.

 

THE BOOK.  I am getting closer and closer to finishing my book about my life and times of being a vendor selling at these crazy ass shows the past 17 years.  You can read about many of our mis-adventures and see what these shows are really like.  Good times.  Bad times.  Funny stuff.   Please email me at book@starvingvendors so I can notify you when it is done.  Sometime in the fall, I expect to be finished.