[AT] More Portland... a question and a bit of a rant..

[Francis Robinson]

    I have a letter from the Tri-state club here "somewhere" but fear that it might have crawled under a piece of furniture and died somewhere. If someone has it handy could you check to see for sure what the camping charge is if you DO NOT bring a tractor?
    I have always brought at least one tractor and one year I brought a couple and some extra equipment trying to make our ATIS display even better. Since they will no longer let us have our own area I don't really care if I haul one up there or not. It isn't free to haul these days.
   Quite frankly I think that considering the strong publicity (which they are unaware of) and the extra show traffic and display items (which seems to not matter) that that we as a group contribute that they are now treating us as a group rather shabbily. They seem to think our grouping our tractors together somehow takes away from the show I guess. Now we are being told that we must surrender part of our camping area that we have used for many years so someone else can use it. What sense does it make for us to move part of our area to a different area? Why can't the users that will be taking our area just use the area they want to crowd us over into? We really crowd a lot of campers into a tiny area each year and do not use nearly as much of the camp grounds as an equal number of other individual campers do. We do all either show or pay the full amount just like everybody else even though we use less space per camper in that little spot. Gene Dotson is very active and works every work day and participates in several ways during the show. Diana and I have cleaned the grounds after shows and swap meets both and we make the drive to go to the Xmas dinner at Fort Recovery OH each winter regardless of weather. I just don't understand why we are suddenly the "poor relations" with the club directors... I'm only going so I can see ATIS friends. If not for that I would probably just stay home this year. We used to hang around the ATIS show area and meet with those ATIS folks who came to the show but didn't camp. Now we don't have an area. There were no ATIS group pictures last year, another result of not having an area of our own. We met at our tractors at 11:00 AM each year for pictures for a long time. I don't object to changes as long as they are needed but most of these seem unneeded. Its not like we are asking for special rates or major special privelages. We do pay full price.
   Depending on how things go this year we may rethink next year. There are a lot of other possibilities...


farmer

Francis Robinson
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at hotmail.com


_________________________________________________________________
Get thousands of games on your PC, your mobile phone, and the web with Windows®.
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/108588800/direct/01/