After three days of travel, Marilyn and I arrived at Peoria, IL. The headquarters hotel, the Père Marquette, is an old hotel with small elevators. It took 4-5 minutes wait to get to ride up to our room, but we did get our truck unloaded and were settled in our room by mid-Afternoon. There is going to be a terrible traffic jam at the elevators when the show moves over to the Civic Center on Thursday morning.
One nice feature of the rooms is a DSL hookup for your computer. This allows me to see how the rest of you live that have access to high speed internet. I'll tell you it's a heck of a lot better than our 75 year old phone lines along Lakeshore Drive in Idaho. I used to be on a 6 party phone line! That's the way I normally surf the web.
I wandered the halls looking for open rooms, but found little action. There were several of our ORCA members set up in their rooms and everyone was having a good time. I found little to add to my collection, but did buy a very unique wooden reel/ice fishing tip-up that rings an alarm bell when the crank is turned.
We brought mostly small items such as tins, Pflueger store boxes, line spools, etc. to sell, and we did much better than expected this first day.
There was a terrific lightning show and thundershower around 10 PM to close the day. It was quite beautiful arcing across the sky.
We look forward to seeing all of you who are coming to the show. Stop in room 323 and let's visit a while. If you're an old grouch (or your name is Carl C) go to room 434, where you can talk to ORCA President Andy Foster.
