Antique Flea Market setup

Now that Tammy has a few Women Expos under her belt, she was encouraged to organize and re-start an antique flea market at the Flathead County fairgrounds.

Unlike the people who are home-based direct sellers, Tammy doesn't have contacts in the antique and flea market community.  She was introduced to the woman who used to organize the antique flea markets until she quit a few years ago.  Leslie helped Tammy in re-starting things though she couldn't find her book with her contact information and only could provide some names from memory.  Needless to say it has been a challenge for Tammy to organize this event.  Add in that:

• some vendors had been burned by another person who organized these type of events, and
• they don't know Tammy

and it was tough to get people to sign on.  Then at the last minute a few vendors changed their mind or had "family emergencies" to prevent them from attending.  With all the family emergencies you'd think some major event had occurred in the Valley.  I haven't heard anything of the sort in the news. 

Friday was "set up" day.  Tammy told the vendors they could come from 4 pm to 8 pm to set up their display.  Tammy and I planned on getting there before 3 pm to get the keys to the building and to measure and tape off the vendor locations.  There were four or five vendors already waiting for us when we got there.  So we had to balance finding their vendor location with measuring and taping everyone's location.  We had to move some fairground stuff to a corner we weren't using and also had to turn on the heat as it was colder in the room than outside.

At 4 pm many of the vendors came and it was a crazy time.

We were in the grandstand building and it is an old building.  The fairground had just replaced all the doors with modern doors that also had windows in them.  One end of the building had doors at ground level.  This side had an alley that made it hard to allow many people to unload their vehicles at once.  The main side of the building - with the parking lot - had three steps to climb to get into the building with no ramp.  A hand rail is only on one side of the wide entrance.

A number of vendors are quite old and I ended up helping some of them carry their stuff inside the building to their location.  It was amazing how much they could pack into their small pickups or other vehicles.

Tammy and I planned on using my pickup to haul our signs to the fairgrounds but my pickup wouldn't start.  For sure, the battery was dead.   Once things settled down after 7 pm I went to Walmart and bought a new battery.  This is the first time I changed the battery in the pickup and I found it was more complicated than unhooking the terminal and lifting the battery out.  As a result I didn't get back to the fairgrounds until 8:20 pm  to a Tammy who was mad that I wasn't back by 8 pm.