Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Here's an excerpt from my book   Street Fairs for profit, fun and madness  on page 44 where I tell about a day and a half of rainwater flooding the booths with 2 feet of water at the Ostrich Festival in Chandler, AZ.  The book has just been published and sells for $14.95

We arrived on Thursday afternoon and set up.  The show opened up on Friday and during the evening, it started raining.  Throughout the night, we listened to the rain coming down on top of our motor home.  Periodically, the rain would slow down, but would come down hard shortly after.  Earlier on Friday, there were reports of possible rain.  As I walked around the vendor area, located in a gully, I realized that if we were to get a large amount of rain, the area is going to flood.  The ground was hard and it would take a long time for the water to seep through.  Fortunately, when we closed up Friday evening, we removed most of our things from the ground and elevated them onto tables and hung a lot of our things on the grids.
It started raining on Friday evening. Throughout the night, we listened to the rain coming down on top of our motor home and it was quite loud. Periodically, the rain would slow down, but would come down hard shortly after. Earlier on Friday, there were reports of possible rain. As I walked around the vendor area, located in a gully, I realized that if we were to get a large amount of rain, the area is going to flood. The ground was hard and it would take a long time for the water to seep through. Fortunately, when we closed up Friday evening, we removed most of our things from the ground.  Upon awakening Saturday morning, it was still raining and we pretty much knew that the day was going to be a 'washout'. All day long the rains kept coming and coming.
As we sat in the motor home in the parking lot we saw the ground turning to mud, as some vehicles passed by. We began to wonder if we would be able to get our vehicle out of the parking lot as we saw many vehicles actually get stuck in the mud; tow trucks couldn't even get them out. I gave thought to moving our motor home out of there, but didn’t really have anyplace else to park. We were to remain in that parking lot the remainder of the day.

No comments: