Ahhhhh......My dream job; Checking out restaurants by eating your way through them to see if they're "OK"......Almost as good as "eating our way across Tuscany".
Seriously, though, having done the organizer schtick for 4 years, it is amazingly hard to find a place with good food and service, competitive prices (read that "lowest" prices, for this group) that can handle 100 people or more and is conveniently located such that we, as a group, can easily get there and find our way back to the hotel.
As a group, we've grown from 5-6 cars on Thursday evening to, what?.....over 20 cars and 40 people? Saturday has grown from 50-60 people to over 90? That head count severely limits the places available around Carlisle, so ECB, Norma and Alan have justifiably moved toward bigger towns like Mechanicsburg and Harrisburg, just to get places that can seat us all. I tried to move us all out of Carlisle years back and got a lot of flak for it as being "too far away from the show field". Where else have we ever been that cordoned off a BIG chunk of their parking lot on a Saturday evening just for our cars? It's no easy task to find those places, especially when you live a few hours away. Searching on-line is just the beginning of the quest.
I also know from my years of organizing this event that "you can't please everybody all of the time". Someone always complains about something ( often, the same people year after year). I learned to let it roll off my back while I tried to insure better success every year by doing a lot of leg work prior to the event, just like the Stumpps do. It's a good thing we're retired, as this effort can suck up a lot of time.
As far as the dinners, Kathy and I had very good food and service throughout the weekend. $30 for that level of buffet was very competitively priced. PLus, we got free, really cool, African music (although my table and some others moved to the far side of the room......)
Anyway, complainers aside, I thought it was a well planned, well-thought-out and successful weekend that didn't break the bank, and I'm totally looking forward to NEXT year.
Thanks to Bruce, Norma, Bill and Alan for making this happen year after year!
BTW: Kathy and I stayed at the Park Inn as the 'overflow' place because we couldn't get into the brand-new Courtyard. I saw into some Courtyard rooms and they were wicked nice and the whole place still smells new. I also chose the Park Inn because I could schlep my 100 pounds of A/V equipment from the room to the banquet hall far easier than across town. Their breakfasts were quite good, service was very good, and they can expand the breakfast area for larger groups, like us or there's a Dunkies just across the street (as well as a Lowe's). The room was nice and comfortable but, of course, not as new as the Courtyard, and, depending on which building we get a block of rooms in, the parking could be totally secluded from the street for the entire group, giving more piece of mind to those who worry about their cars.
For all that, I gave up all those hours with everyone in the hospitality room at the Courtyard. Maybe next year we'll be closer to the rest of the group, but we still had a great, great time.
gn
