Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Adventure at Balls Falls

I just completed the four-day Balls Falls Thanksgiving Festival (Canadian Thanksgiving) and it ended up with an unusual adventure.  After three beautifully sunny but cold days, it rained on Monday and turned the grounds into a muddy mess.  Around 3:30pm, a very large van tried to exit the area and managed to slip and slide right into my tent!!!!!  The guy had tried a couple of times to get through the somewhat narrow opening between my tent and the cars parked along the side, and each time his bald tires let him slip closer to me.  Finally he hit one of my tent poles.  I screamed at him to stop, and fortunately he did.  There was no way he could go backwards or forwards without sliding further into my tent which was staked firmly into the ground.  The only solution was to take my tent down and hope that the pole wasn't damaged.  With some help from the show personnel, I packed up all my inventory, broke down the displays and emptied the tent.  We removed all the stakes and weights and when the tent was free of restraints, we picked it up and moved it about a foot and a half away from the van.  This was my first time to use the tent, and I had worried about all kinds of things except getting hit by a van!  It turned out that the tent pole and zipper were fine, so now I just have a couple of muddy side walls to clean up.