Just back from the Royal Norfolk show, we went up on the Sunday to set up. As usual, nothing goes very smoothly! I met my dad at work, and he had put all the bits we needed to set up the tent in the trailer. I specifically said, ‘have you got all of the tent, because there doesn’t look like enough?’ He assured me he had.
I had my uncle and Boyfriend meet me at the showground to help put the tent up because ‘many hands make light work’ We got the top of the tent done and decided that we should put the roof of it on now while it was closer to the ground. This is where I see my dad looking at all the sides of the tent and scratching his head. I ask him what the problem was, and this is where he informs me that he doesn’t think we have the top of the tent. This was of course… my fault!
He rang up my mum who was at the office about half an hour away to see if she could look for it, she quickly found it and said that she would drive over to us. The rest of us got to work putting the rest of the tent together and putting up out smaller one because if not we would have been there until midnight!
However, we then ran out of screws and wingnuts. Apparently after a while of using the tent, packing up in a rush and forcing things together because we lost the instructions, we had a lot of missing ones and bent ones that were no longer usable. Luckily my uncle is quite handy, and he managed to bend some ground stakes to fit so that it wasn’t all undone at the bottom.
We got everything together and finished off by pulling the roof of the tent on and came home, I was VERY sunburnt at this point, good job everyone told me how red I was because I don’t know if I’d have known otherwise!!
Tuesday came and we headed down there with the clothing which by the time we got there and got my mum set up in the business tent, we just dumped the clothes in and said I could set up in the morning.
The morning came and I got to the showground at about 7am, I got straight to work hanging the clothes up, getting signs out for the right clothing and started panicking that I might not actually get this done in time. I was also on my own at this point and started getting anxious that people would think that I wasn’t very good because I hadn’t got set up the night before. But I got done and was open on time.
We had a work experience girl with us at work over the week and she came to the show to help me on the stand and help she did! We spent the two days getting everything packaged and accounted for between customers and I officially have a stock take sorted!
It was amazing to meet so many new people, and as always, was so nice to see familiar faces and the people that come back every year!
We can’t wait for next year!