Edmonds, day 3

[offcntr]

Day three at Edmonds is more of the same: sunny, mild, moderately attended. More adventures with Spot, who climbs up on Denise's lap at one point. More returning customers, including a couple that have been coming to see us since our early Best of the Northwest days. And more overheard conversations from the back of the booth, leading to more grumpy exodii by Denise. But one of them leads to her finding and buying some handsome pencil cases, so it's all good.

We sell all right, fewer transactions than Friday, but slightly higher average, so we wind up within $50 of Friday's total. Our sales curve is a classic bell distribution; other vendors say sales were heavily skewed toward Friday, with Saturday less, Sunday even worse. Don't know what that says about the fair over all, except that going from low booth fee and commission to a flat (and higher) fee is going to be hard on a lot of folks. I don't know what last year's booth fee was, but my wild-ass-guess and back-of-envelope calculations suggest that I would have paid just about the same either way.

Take-down is as tightly monitored as set-up, with volunteers confirming you've dismantled your booth before they give you a permit to get your vehicle into the queue. We're fortunate that three of our neighbors, including the ones between us and the traffic lane, are all done and out early, giving us space to stack our pottery boxes and shelves and pull down the booth without worrying about blocking traffic.

I get my permit around 7:30, dash off to catch the shuttle and drive my van through the prescribed route, to find that the line runs two blocks south and a further half block west, and the end is a very steep upgrade, where I pull up, put it in park, and turn off the van. And realize it's the warmest part of the day, I'm in for god-knows-how-long a wait, and I didn't grab a water bottle from the booth.

Fortunately, I have my phone, and Denise slogs uphill with not only a water bottle but the cooler with our sandwiches, so we settle in for a restorative turkey-and-cucumber while we wait for our turn. Which comes much sooner than expected. Volunteers on the radio have confirmed that there's open parking in our area, so I don't even finish my sandwich before we're pulled out of line and sent to load up. There's a big panel truck blocking the front of our booth, but I park and load from the back. I have to shift forward a few feet and wait in the van at one point to allow two other vendors to get around me, but we're packed and away by 8:08.

We're staying one more night, driving back in the morning, since neither of us are up for six hours of driving after a ten-hour day.