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This was our first year participating in this show on the west coast of California. We had spent a week in Half Moon Bay State Park last year between shows and loved it, great beach, nice little restaurants, a wonderful bike trail, we saw a few whales and overall really enjoyed ourselves during a “working vacation”.  This year we arrived the day before the show and left the day after the show, no time for play, we were just here for the show.

 Half Moon Bay is due west of the San Francisco area with one small highway leading into the community from Hwy 101.  I understand traffic is horrendous getting into town on either day of the event.   We arrived mid-afternoon on Friday and after getting stuck on Hwy 101 in the Bay Area for 2 hours due to a traffic accident, if I were a patron, I’m not sure I would want to put up with the difficulty of getting to this event.

Details:

Set up is difficult, no other word to describe it.  It’s a very narrow street with a same day set up.  They do assign the earlier times to people who pull trailers or who have large trucks so with our monster F450 DRW we were assigned the 4:30 AM load in time.   We pulled in, dropped all our “stuff” off and were not even close to being the first people in our section to be setting up, some of the artists got there at 3 AM or earlier.  Many of the artists hand trucked everything into the show.  Parking around the show was very difficult, after unloading Dale moved the truck 4 blocks away.  At 5 AM?? The closest parking was 4 blocks away??  OK, that was just a sign of how bad parking was going to be this weekend. We set up with little fuss other than feeling like we were freezing to death.  The marine layer was still very thick and everything felt damp and cold, thank goodness for gloves.  We then left, went back to our RV park and cleaned up, made some more hot coffee and headed back to the show.  This time parking was even worse but we lucked out and got a close spot due to someone who was leaving.

Show:  Packed with people, even  before 9 AM on Saturday.  Our first sale came while we only had about 1/3^rd of our jewelry out and still had a mess in the floor of the booth.  We quickly tried to finish the set up and make sure we were ready to sell.  Our Saturday sales were “OK”.  Most other shows we would have been quite happy but given the difficulty of doing this show and the GREAT reviews we had heard about it, we were sort of expecting more.  Not sure how much our booth location impacted our sales, we were right across from the main stage and the food court.  The music was great at this festival, some of the best we’ve heard lately, but it was very difficult to hear. 

By Saturday afternoon the road was so packed with people that I think some folks were afraid to walk into a booth thinking they would never get back into the flow of traffic.  We also had numerous issues where people were standing in front of the booth, blocking access to it with their backs to us watching the crowd or the music.  More than once Dale took out the glass cleaner and “chased them away”.  When that didn’t work with some particularly obtuse people, 2 different parties blocking both corners of the entryway into our booth I went up and diplomatically told them they had been there for more than 30 minutes, we were paying for our retail spot this weekend and they were interfering with our ability to make a profit.  One lady actually said we just wanted to get out of the crowd, to which I replied, I understand, but please don’t inhibit some of that crowd from becoming our customers, we’re here to make a living.  If we go back,  we really want a different booth location.  The only upside of this location is that our booth was one of the closest to the artist hospitality room which I wasn’t too concerned about, more importantly there were flush toilets in that building and it was so nice not to stand in line to just the porta potties.  By the time the day was over we were so happy to be headed back to the RV, we were exhausted.  Traffic was at its worst, we were so glad we were slightly south of town, the traffic heading north on CA 1 to CA 92 to get back to the Bay Area was backed up for miles and we were passed by 3 emergency vehicles.   I heard a lot of comments on Sunday morning that Saturday evening traffic was worse than usual, but not by much. 

Sunday the crowd was a little smaller, definitely less packed in the morning, but still very large on Sunday afternoon.  Our sales were very close to the same as Saturday sales which is unusual for us, usually we see a drop off on Sunday, but I think we had $100 difference between the 2 days.  Wish we had more shows where the sales were more equally distributed between both days.  Much to our surprise, we had 2 customers who came to this show for the first time just to find us.  One of the customers was someone we had made a custom bracelet for at last year’s Mountain View show, her Mom and Sister loved the bracelet so she wanted 2 more in different lengths and was planning to take them back to Germany with her at Christmas for gifts for Mom and Sis.  We had to cancel Mountain View this year due to an issue with the upgrade on our truck and being stuck in Colorado so it was really nice to hear that she came to Half Moon Bay from the Bay Area, fought the crowds and traffic just so she could buy 2 more bracelets.  Gotta love customers who really make an effort, especially when she could have just called us. 

Sunday around 4:00 the crowd started slowing down, but even at 5:00 there were still way more people on the street than I’m used to seeing at most of our shows, especially considering some of them had a long, slow drive back to the Bay Area.  We finally started packing down about 5:15, the show officially ended at 5:00 but the music was still playing, people were still in the streets and we didn’t notice anyone else packing down.  Load out is just as difficult as load in, only with even more of a time constraint.  The city requires the street to be cleared by 8 PM.  We figured we would never be able to get our truck in, so we started hand carting past long lines of patron cars creeping slowly out of town.  I think it would have taken at least 30-45 minutes just to get our truck into the show, if there had been room.  After the first 2 loads and getting everything packed in the truck, the street was really clearing out, we had our canopy, weights and a few miscellaneous items so Dale decided to get the truck in so we wouldn’t have to hand cart the last 2 loads.  Well, that turned into a fiasco when the honey bucket truck was blocking our entrance into the show, he had to drive around the entire show to come in from the west side instead of the east side which took an extra 30 minutes.  By then the volunteers were reminding us we had to be off the street by 8 to which I replied we would have been gone already if you hadn’t blocked our entrance into the show.  I literally sat there with the rest of our stuff for 30 minutes, the truck was 5 minutes away, we could have been out of there much quicker if they had kept our access open.  We were finally driving off the show site around 7:45, a much longer load out for us than usual and by then we were once again chilled and tired and just happy to be going back to our RV.

Weather – Saturday was decent after the marine layer finally burned off around 11:30, I think the highs got into the mid 50’s with sunshine so it was nice, but the first few hours of the morning were kind of chilly and by 4 you were starting to feel the chill in the air again.  Sunday the sun never came out, temps in the 50’s and it was downright chilly all day.  This was definitely a show to bring your gloves and warm layers to and lots of warm beverages.

Our final assessment of this show, a very difficult show to do with a same day load in, very early start to the show at 9 AM both days with the crowd already packing the streets at 9 AM on Saturday.  It was  a fun show to do, a lot of great artwork, didn’t see a lot of evidence of buy / sell, but there were a couple of booths that I know are “family operated” or that use “apprentices”, but overall it was well juried, well balanced, tons of people, great music and ok sales.  Will we do it again?  Maybe, we will consider it, we would like to try a different booth location and see if we weren’t in the most crowded area of the show if it would be better.  This is not a show for the faint of heart to do, but it’s very well run and very well attended.