Lee.org

I went I went to the East Coast Hobby Show in Fort Washington, PA looking to speak with manufacturers and remote control know-it-alls for a project. What a total frigging waste of time. The website and the advertising material blatantly lies about what kind of a show it is. It is billed as a “full line hobby show” but it is, in fact a train show.

Take a look at the photo of the poster I took (the odd vertical line in the photo is me merging two photos to get a good shot of the whole poster) Now don’t get me wrong, trains are well and good. But I came looking for… well, looking for what they said they had. Their sign says, “Over 200 of the largest manufacturers, distributors and publishers will be exhibiting.” Well, after I walked the entire show, I went to the info booth at the front and asked, “I was wondering if there are any manufacturer reps here like the sign says.”
The response, “There was one guy here yesterday.”
“Yeah, but yesterday was a dealers-only day.”
“Yeah, sorry.”

And it was a fine train show. There were hundreds of model train exhibitors, miles of track laid and thousands of 2″ tall trees and people and ity bity locomotives with fake smoke gleefully billowing out of them. There was a huge setup, taking up 100′ x 100′ with this amazing 9″ tall set (9″… is that HO scale? N? PG-13? I forget) with amazingly realistic Maersk and Sealand and double-decker containers just like I’ve seen rolling across the NJ Meadowlands. It was pretty cool…. except that it had NOTHING to do with what I was looking for. I drove a friggin hour and fourty-five minutes each way for nothin.

“R/C planes will be landing at the show” Ummm. where? The show is indoors. There was no space for indoor flight, no calendar of such events (no calendar at all, actually) and none of the 4 airplane exhibitors had anything that could fly.

Phoey.

Through all of this, a few good things still came to pass. While I was driving down there, a Computer Guy client of mine called me in need of help. I was happy to help, it let the time pass quicker. After a while, I told her where I was going and why. She came back with, “Oh really! My sister-in-law works with kids with C.P. They use all kinds of stuff like that. I’ll get you in touch with her!” Cool beans. There might have been a little kismet going on there..

After I realized the hobby show was a bust, I called PPG. She was in an art show called The Big Art Show in Asbury Park. Since I was “in the neighborhood” (a mere 1 1/4 hrs away) I decided to make a run for the coast! Also, my client was encouraging me to enjoy life a bit more :-). Well, the evening was quite a bit more fun than I thought it might be. I got to see PPG and Taco and Joe (who is also moving to the bay area soon) and meet some new nice folks. So there.