We’re not impressed.
Yesterday, Mike and I drove down to the new Cardinals Stadium in Glendale, AZ for the “Men’s Luxury Toy Expo and Sale.”
Mike and I are big into toys. It isn’t because we like to be conspicuous consumers. We have so few close friends in the area that there’s no one to show off to. It’s just that we like to play with toys. So it’s always nice to see what’s out there to play with.
If your idea of a “luxury toy” includes hot tubs, sand rails (modern day dune buggies), and garage storage solutions, then this show was for you. Unfortunately, those things don’t fall into what we’d consider luxury toys. We were pretty disappointed, since that’s what dominated the show.
To be fair, there were two or three Ferraris (the definitive sports car, in my opinion) and some very nice, mint condition classic cars. And I did like the idea of buying a room on a residential cruise ship to live out the rest of my life on a nonstop, around-the-world cruise. (Now that’s a house boat! I just find the $1.8 million entry fee plus $90K annual maintenance a bit tough to swallow right now.) But there were also vendors selling beef jerky, overpriced plastic shoes, and miracle mops. (In my opinion, if you have enough cash to afford a real luxury toy, you also have enough to pay a professional to keep it clean for you.)
The weirdest thing was seeing an advertisement for one of the garage storage solution places with the same exact layout and colors as my Flying M Air brochure. If that wasn’t a rip off of David’s design work, I don’t know what is. They could have at least changed the color scheme. The ad was in the show brochure and I won’t dignify it (or spread the word about the company) by reproducing it here. I’m just glad they weren’t pushing helicopter tours and charters. I’m trying to use the design for my new branding and it’s not nice to see someone else trying to do the same thing with the same design.
I’d brought along a bunch of Flying M Air brochures and old Sedona/Grand Canyon rack cards with the idea of leaving a few around on tables with other mixed literature. There weren’t any such tables, so I wound up carrying around the brochures for the whole show. That wasn’t so bad because we were only there for about an hour.
I thought the event might be a good place to advertise the business. Imagine bringing Zero-Mike-Lima onto the show floor, all sparkling and clean. That would certainly get some attention! But when I saw the kinds of people walking the floor, I realized that the dreamers outnumbered the buyers by a good margin. (The beef jerky guy was doing a good business but I didn’t see the residential cruise ship guy handing out too many cards.)
I don’t regret going, though. We got to see the inside of Cardinals stadium, which isn’t 100% finished yet. (Looks like they still have some painting to do in the bowels of the arena.) It’s a nice place — very state-of-the-art and the air conditioning works pretty darn good. The show was on the stadium’s concrete floor. The grass, which was growing nicely outside, looked ready to roll in for a game any time. The only thing I regret was not taking a few pictures. It isn’t often that you get to walk on the field (sans grass) for the newest football stadium in the country.
Would I go again? Doubtful. I’ll call later today to see what the exhibitor pricing is like. If it’s affordable, I might give it a try. Depends on how the beginning of my season goes. The show is in February; my big season here in Arizona starts in November. So I have plenty of time to think about it.
Although it’s not a difficult trip, it is a long one. Although Mike and I have horses and ride once in a while (not as often as we used to, I’m afraid), this is 4 to 5 hours in the saddle — enough to make anyone sore. But it’s worth it. Only a tiny percentage of the millions of people who visit the Grand Canyon each year actually descend into the canyon. This is one of the “easy” ways to do it. And you get a whole different view of the canyon once you get below the rim.
I’m sitting on a plastic chair on the front patio of a ground-floor apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, watching four men wash the apartment building across the street. It looks to be a 24-story building and, like most of the buildings in this area, it’s got a steel and glass facade. The four men are sitting on separate wooden seats — kind of like the seats you’d find on a swing set — hanging from ropes on top of the building, about four stories down. Two of them have long hoses and the other two have brushes on long poles and plastic pails. They’re all wearing shorts and sneakers and are doing a lot of bouncing off the walls as they move back and forth and down.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying my non-working hours in a clean, safe, and rather beautiful Canadian city. The weather is beautiful, in the mid 70s and mostly sunny, although a marine layer of clouds seems to be drifting in as I type this. My hotel and the office/apartment I’m working at are right on the water near Stanley Park. The view from my hotel room at the Westin is full of boats and seaplanes and healthy people strolling the waterfront.
Jim is like me. He doesn’t take a lot of bullshit. He told them what they could do with their hangars and applied for a permit with Maricopa County to build a hangar and helipad at his house. In less than a year, he had a huge hangar on his 48-acre spread with a nicely marked and perfectly legal helipad out front.
We took off to the south, toward the airport. I’d brought along my video camera and Mike was using it to shoot images of the things we flew over. I’ve been wanting to get some good video footage from the helicopter for 
We used to do aerial photography together with a Pentax 67 medium format camera. It was a pain in the butt. The camera could only hold 20 shots (I think), it weighed a ton, and although it did have an exposure meter, it didn’t have automatic exposure. That means the photographer had to adjust the shutter speed or aperture for every shot based on the meter reading. Mike didn’t like to do that. He’d set the exposure once or twice during the whole shoot. So half the pictures would be under or over exposed. Of course, the film couldn’t be processed in WIckenburg — we had to send it out. And we had to send out for enlargements, too. It was idiotic.