And yeah, Tim picked a fight with the gatekeeper this afternoon, but other than that, things went pretty smoothly on the way out.
Yeah, and that was wrong of me to lose my temper. Sorry about that; it does not happen often. Ralph caught me off guard with stopping me from pulling in the van to do pickup (especially when they had stressed to us to “get out quickly” but then was preventing us from doing what we needed to do to fulfill it) but we made up a few minutes later. Ralph was in a tough position in that the organizers left him to deal with all the crap and I think he finally was fed up with everything. No hard feelings on my part. I would be happy to return there with, as Ben mentions, a little more clarification on (1) the available space and (2) parameters of set up and tear down. Even with that, tear down went smooth and fast, which is always nice.
A few other thoughts on what was learned and what we can do to improve:
– We need to discuss getting stanctions of some kind. With how many times little kids reached out to the USG Titan, I’m surprised Evan did not go into cardiac arrest. 🙂 I did not notice any real problems on the train table, even though much of it was right at the edge. I did notice that when Matt had his bricks out on Saturday afternoon working on the mountain, some of the public thought it was a hands-on uild and actually were carefully putting a few piece onto the mountain.
– I would like to see the overall display be more seamless. It takes lots of extra planning (and brick) to do this but in the end, it will be worth it. Perhaps having a stock of “pre-MILS’d” baseplates would help. Something to continue to discuss on an ongoing basis.
– Time management for display preparation. Going into this, I thought we were all ahead of the curve. We started talking about this display back in July. However, time quickly caught up to us. I was unprepared for the amount of planning. So for future displays, the longer the lead time, the better.
Overall, it was a lot of fun. And we got to put a little coin in the LUG account. Onward to the Trolly Museum.