Chowdah. (Boston, MA)

Sorry for the lapse in posts, but yesterday and last night were pretty insane. I worked the booth by myself in the afternoon, and then Fred and I worked the last marketplace until midnight, then had to pack up the Reactable and all of the materials, as the convention center closed at 3am. We barely beat it – they literally locked the doors behind us as we piled our stuff out front.

I’m about to take my cousin out to lunch at Legal Seafoods at the Prudential Center, in thanks for putting us up for the week. It’s a selfish ploy, though, because I have to have Legals at least once on every trip to Boston. Baked scrod and clam chowder await me. Mmmm.

All in all, I think the weekend was a great success. Certainly the Benefit Concert went about as well as it could have, and we’ll wait a month or so to judge the value of the NACA investment, if we’re able to book a bunch of shows from the contacts we made… but it felt like it went really well. We actually did book two shows on-site, one in September at a school in Western Colorado, and one in early May at a school in Pennsylvania. We’ll work with both schools to see if we can build in a block with other universities in their areas, to make the trips as worthwhile as possible.

We had really, really good feedback from the management companies who came back by our booth to talk with us, a couple of them asking to have dinner to chat about ‘opportunities,’ etc. – we didn’t follow up on any of them, but it was nice to see the level of interest. Across the board, they all said that they couldn’t believe that we were 100% self-represented and that it was our first convention. They said that it looked like we’d been doing it for years, and/or that we had some sort of management driving the bus… so that’s nice. We definitely worked hard and really thought out how we could make a solid presentation without breaking the bank, etc. One management rep came over to me and said, “so – tell me – how is it that no one is representing you guys yet? How is it that no one has signed you yet?” I said, “well, for one, we’re relatively new – and for two, we’re doing well on our own, so we haven’t sought it out.” He was one of the ones who later wanted to have dinner.  🙂

Speaking of dinner, it’s time for some lunch. I fly out to Colorado tomorrow, stopping in Chicago en route… so I may post another update here or to my blog, if anything interesting comes up. Thanks for reading about our trip… the next one is planned for April, I think, so we’ll be back to the Road Journal then.

Hasta for now. I’ll leave you with a nice photo submitted by one of our new friends and fans at Fitchburg State in Massachusetts: