What Happens In Vegas...

So, we leave for Las Vegas on Friday morning at 6 am for the International Baking Industry Exposition.  And I would be lying if I didn't say that we are a little stricken at the thought of leaving PJP Buttonwood for four full days.  Our longest absence has been one business day and even then, we were only a few miles away and Jeanne called Mac so many times to check on him that he threatened to answer the phone "Hi Jeanne, I'm fine..." We've both been back and forth over the past week about whether we should go or not.  By Saturday, Jeanne declared in the midst of all the work and chaos of Roots and Blues that she absolutely COULD NOT attend the convention because she was worried that no one would clean the baking trays at the end of the days we will be gone.  Which is interesting because I've  worried more that we will feel short staffed without Jeanne and I there.  And perhaps that our customers will feel we don't care about our store since we aren't there all day this Friday and Saturday.  I KNOW.  Both of our concerns sound sort of ridiculous when I read them, but let's keep it real here for the sake of us all.

Surprisingly enough though, neither of us have been to a massive industry trade show.  Because this particular show has an entire focus on baking (and therefore a good number of vendors there to talk about pie and pie-related items) AND it only takes place every three years, we've decided that we would be pretty crazy to miss out and wait until 2019 for the next scheduled convention.  The last time I looked, there are 1,104 exhibitors with booths planned in the Las Vegas Convention Center.  Even if only a fraction of those are pie-related, well...we will learn something to make the trip worth it, right?  And we are attending a networking event on Friday night wherein we plan to preach #WorldPieDomination to anyone who will listen...so that has to be worth something.

(And let's not forget to mention that we've never been to Las Vegas together.  We've each only been once and with other people, so I am a little interested in what sort of interesting adventures we can find for ourselves.  What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas...unless you write a blog and have a lot of people curious to see how the whole weekend shakes out.  Ahem.)

Finally, if you know either of us at all, you won't be surprised to learn that we have never ordered ourselves an actual business card in our entire 2 1/12 year history.  Probably because we could think of more interesting stuff to do and because we couldn't figure out what we wanted it to look like to save our lives.  So when we became friends a few weeks ago with the super talented Christy Asper of The Ink Cafe AND Las Vegas loomed on the horizon, we knew we needed to get our game together and she was the one to help us.  Today, she stopped by with a full supply of the most AMAZING business cards ever to give us the boost to fly straight to Vegas and leave our stamp on the pie-baking industry...