Big Weekend

This is the weekend that, according to the All Point Bulletin, 10,000 visitors will appear in Point Roberts to celebrate the Arts and Music Festival and B.C. Day, marking the first weekend/Monday in August.  Now, how we would suddenly get 10,000 people through the border just for the weekend I can't imagine.  Maybe they started arriving in June.  I went through the border yesterday and there was no particular lineup and I asked somebody who had just come over, this morning, and they said that the lineup was minimal.

10,000 people would be about five visitors per house.  Don't think it's going to happen.  But, there are more people around than usual.  We went over to the Saturday Market this morning and sold some of Ed's Point Roberts postcards.  There were only about 9 vendors, but there was a steady enough supply of buyers and lookers to keep the vendors entertained.  The Seniors Group sold great quantities of cookies and other baked goods.  The Friends of the Library contributed to the recirculation of books by selling donated books.  An Avon rep, the chocolates lady, a jewelry lady, the Sagewood Farms guy, a lady selling shelled walnuts for $5.00/pound joined in to the modest selling frenzy.  A kind of mixed bag today.

What was interesting about the customers today (and maybe this is who shows up on B.C. Day) is that they were more than willing to hang around and look at postcards, talk about the images, and talk about the details of Point Roberts that the postcards illustrated.  Yes, they'd seen Lily the Llama and the four goats.  And what were the goats' names?  The abandoned house quilt postcards provoked discussions about the actual houses, the quilts (now on display in the Community Center), and peoples' own histories with the houses.  Two guys (brothers?) told me that they had lived many years ago in both the Goodman house and the Hanssen/Jonsen house (on corner of Tyee and Benson).  But they got away before I found out how that happened to be.  People went through the books of postcards, looking at every photo (70 or so) and trying to figure out where on the Point it was taken.  A very social experience compared to other Saturday Market Days.

Was a nice day all round here in momentary paradise.  And two more days of the weekend to go.