Back from Maine.
Aug. 26th, 2008 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dalesqlJust got back home from Bangor, Maine, where I spent a rather exhausting week being the festival electrician for the American Folk Festival. Carl, who was supposed to be the other festival electrician got canceled by his day job deciding that he couldn't be spared. Ugh.
Fortunately, there were plenty of volunteers who were willing to help out, and were able to do a pretty good job of doing some of the more time-consuming tasks. This was mostly hanging of lights in the various smaller tents. (Small being defined as any tent smaller than fifty feet long. ) It did take some of my time to show them the easiest way to put up lights, and how to put them up so they were easy to take down at the end of the festival. But it allowed me to keep my head above water. The electricians from the city of Bangor did their usual wonderful job of putting in all my power tie-ins and taking care of all the food vendors. (Can you say high-maintanence? Yeah, they are... )
We were blessed with fantastic weather. One morning during setup week we had pretty heavy rain, but it was early enough that there were still plenty of tasks that cound be done under tents, so it wasn't that bad. The rain let up shortly after lunch that day, and it didn't rain the rest of the festival.
Of course, since I was soaked by that rain, I decided to borrow one of the festival vehicles to go back to the hotel, change into dry clothes, and pick up the Derbyshires, who had flown in that morning. I managed to have a minor automobile accident in the hotel parking lot. (No damage I could see other than slightly scraped paint. ) To make it even more unpleasant was that the driver of the other vehicle was a girl who had just gotten her drivers license the day before. I was more annoyed by the whole thing, but for this girl, it was a fairly emotional trauma, and was worrying about how to break the news to her parents. Police came, took everyone's information, and I haven't heard any news since.
The festival was a great success by what I heard on site. Attendance guesses were ranging from 110-140K over the three days. Have to wait for the arial photographs to come back and be analyzed for the official numbers. While I didn't get all the things I wanted to do on the site, I think that I didn't embarrass myself.
Now to record everything that I did to better plan for next year, and to start serious planning for the Richmond (Virginia) Folk Festival, which I'll be doing the same job without city electricians... in only five weeks. Yikes!
Fortunately, there were plenty of volunteers who were willing to help out, and were able to do a pretty good job of doing some of the more time-consuming tasks. This was mostly hanging of lights in the various smaller tents. (Small being defined as any tent smaller than fifty feet long. ) It did take some of my time to show them the easiest way to put up lights, and how to put them up so they were easy to take down at the end of the festival. But it allowed me to keep my head above water. The electricians from the city of Bangor did their usual wonderful job of putting in all my power tie-ins and taking care of all the food vendors. (Can you say high-maintanence? Yeah, they are... )
We were blessed with fantastic weather. One morning during setup week we had pretty heavy rain, but it was early enough that there were still plenty of tasks that cound be done under tents, so it wasn't that bad. The rain let up shortly after lunch that day, and it didn't rain the rest of the festival.
Of course, since I was soaked by that rain, I decided to borrow one of the festival vehicles to go back to the hotel, change into dry clothes, and pick up the Derbyshires, who had flown in that morning. I managed to have a minor automobile accident in the hotel parking lot. (No damage I could see other than slightly scraped paint. ) To make it even more unpleasant was that the driver of the other vehicle was a girl who had just gotten her drivers license the day before. I was more annoyed by the whole thing, but for this girl, it was a fairly emotional trauma, and was worrying about how to break the news to her parents. Police came, took everyone's information, and I haven't heard any news since.
The festival was a great success by what I heard on site. Attendance guesses were ranging from 110-140K over the three days. Have to wait for the arial photographs to come back and be analyzed for the official numbers. While I didn't get all the things I wanted to do on the site, I think that I didn't embarrass myself.
Now to record everything that I did to better plan for next year, and to start serious planning for the Richmond (Virginia) Folk Festival, which I'll be doing the same job without city electricians... in only five weeks. Yikes!
