Orlando Day 5 to 8

Warning - Very Long Post

I thought this might happen. Too much to do and not enough time to do it! The only time I have in my room since Thursday was to sleep. So now that I am at Orlando Airport waiting to fly to Las Vegas I finally have time to do some typing but will not be able to put it onto the net till I get to the other end. Finally getting to post this on Wednesday in Las Vegas, I have put together an overview of the last 4 days and I will have to add some photos at another time (possibly not till next week when I am on the road in California and have some spare time at nights) as I do not have enough time to do it with so much happening.

Orlando Day 5 – Friday

Trading started late today as first there was a general meeting of the BCCA. It was held at the front of the Convention Centre and was well attended by members. There was a board report from yesterday’s board meeting plus a financial report. Then a ballot was taken for new board members and then general business plus questions from the floor after this there was a photo taken of all the international members who were at the general meeting.

Later trading resumed and I continued picking up items all day long with perhaps the best item being a Guinness Light. The person who sold it to me had owned it for 10 years but had never taken it out of its box. My only concern is as I have to post it home that the sign gets home o.k. It is an aluminium box with a Perspex sign in the front of it.

I also picked up some more coasters and bottle tops and also some Milwaukee Best cans. They have some poker playing tips on them and have been released in multiple sizes and types of beer for a few years. I will try to get as many variations as I can but do not think I will have a chance of getting them all.

At 4pm the trading closed for the day and Adam, Barry and I went on a bus trip to the Orlando Brewing Company Brewery for a brewery tour and the boys had a few samples of their different brews. They have a bar area where you can sample 12 different beers that they brew if you want to, or just try pints of any brew you prefer. We will not get a chance to attend but on the Last Saturday night of the month the brewery has Organic Oil Wrestling night. The Orlando Brewery brews organic beers and they get in a female dancing troupe to wrestle in oil, I have been told it is a very well attended event!!!

After the brewery tour we returned to the resort and had some dinner before getting ready to attend the annual Jersey Shores Chapter Party Night. They have a theme night on the Friday of the Canvention and this year’s theme is a tropical Luau night. We had purchased some Hawaiian shirts and Adam had some flashing badges for us to wear. The night was great fun and it went very late into the night.

Orlando Day 6 - Saturday

After the last two days trading and two nights partying it was a slow start to Saturday morning for most people but I had to get to the trade floor early as I needed to start transporting the items I was obtaining back to my room as later in the day I did not want to have to take everything back at the end of the day.

I was able to borrow a trolley from one of the other members and took most of my gains back to the room. Following this I went looking for more Milwaukee Best poker cans and managed to pick up a few more. I also picked up some more bottle tops and coasters plus a couple of Guinness T-shirts that were on offer. I bought a couple of Chapter shirts from both Jersey Shore and The Aluminium Bottle Can chapter. It was interesting to see the prices drop on the items that were for sale by different people. On the last day people who do not want to take home too much of what they bought with them drop the prices they have put on their brewery items. The reason normally is because they had packed their luggage to absolute maximum and with the items that were swapped or purchased they do not have enough room to return everything home.

I did not want to bring home any of the Aussie cans and items I bought with me so I gave what was left to a couple of the chapters to use in any raffles they have in the future.

The official Canvention photographer arranged for our group of 9 Aussie’s to have their photo taken to be included into the BCCA magazine’s next issue. I had been wearing some of my different Guinness hats over the three days and a lot of people attending had either taken my picture or wanted a photo of them and me together. I also got a photo taken with Miss Canvention.

The trading finished at 3pm and it was not too big an effort to get the rest of my items back to the room. Some of our group were able to package some of the boxes to be posted on the Friday Night so they went to the post office to post them home. I knew that there was a main post office near the airport open on Sunday so I started packing my parcels and will post them tomorrow morning.

We then prepared for the Canvention Banquet; it is the final official event of the Canvention. Adam had arranged for me and him to site with some Canadian people including two of the members I had got to know quite well Ed and Larry. These two are a real blast I have had some great laughs with them both for the whole Canvention.

The banquet night also includes an award ceremony for member displays, Presidential awards, Hall of Fame inductees and also a plague is awarded to all the international members who attend the Canvention. Also on each table is a table centrepiece that is themed for the event and it is awarded to one person on the table. On the centrepiece there was an alligator and who ever its right pay was pointing to was the person who got to take home the centrepiece. On our table Adam was the lucky winner.

At the end of the night I went around saying goodbye to all the people attending and thanked them all for the great hospitality they provided to our group and especially for all the help they had provided over the event.

To summarise my experience at Canvention would be to focus on the friendliness of all the people I met during the time in Orlando. I was able to meet some people I had corresponded with previously and was lucky to meet a great bunch of people not only from the US but from a lot of international countries.

The room to room trading early in the event was a great experience and a great way to meet all the other attendees away from the trade floor. I was able to get some good Guinness items and a lot of other memorabilia for my collection and I think as a group us 9 Aussies were able to really put Australia on the map as a good beer can collecting country and I hope were able to put across that we welcome all of the attendees to come to Australia in the future so we can repay the hospitality we have all received here in Orlando.

Then it was back to the room and time to start packing my parcels for tomorrows run to the post office. I got most of it packed but ran out of tape at 1.30am, so I will need to get up early and go and purchase some. I had been watching the weather channel as there is a hurricane heading towards the landfall near where cyclone Katrina hit three years ago. During the afternoon there had been evacuation warnings in that area and people were all moving out of the area, they had turned all the roads into one way, so on the television it showed two 5 lanes of traffic leaving for safer areas.

Orlando Day 7 – Sunday

This morning I got up and when to the shops to get some more tape to finish packing the parcels that I am posting home. I finished up with 5 parcels to post.

Barry, Leanne, Ray and I are going to Tampa after we post the parcels. Today the Tampa Bay Ray’s are playing the Baltimore Oriels in a major league baseball match.

Then I went down to the Hertz rental desk at reception and picked up the keys for my rental car. The company was supposed to provide a sat/nav system for directions but this car did not come with one so I had to go back up to the room to Google the address and write out the directions I needed to take. Luckily it was not a complicated route.

At this time Adam was leaving for home so I said goodbye and wished him a safe trip. He had a great time and it was good for him to catch up with all the BCCA people who he had met on previous visits to the other eight Canvention’s he has attended.

I took the car to reception and also had 3 parcels for Barry and 5 parcels for Ray to go to the post office. We had so much room taken up we had to leave Leanne at the resort and come back and pick her up later to go out.

The three of us took off and found the post office and did our posting. I also managed to pick up a real nice post office stamped envelope for the closing of Yankee Stadium. When we got back to the resort to pick up Leanne and I went and checked for the right directions to get us to Tampa for the baseball game.

Of course it is interesting to drive in America as you drive on the other side of the road and from the left hand side of the car. With Barry and then Leanne giving some good advice the driving was easy, although I was tending to drift to the right in the lane at times and I was always turning on the windscreen wipers instead of the indicators.

We took off for Tampa and along the way near the Disney Parks were some high voltage electrical wires going to a substation but the top of the tower before the substation is shaped like the outline of Mickey Mouse’s head. I could not stop to get a photo unfortunately as the traffic was travelling too quickly for me to pull over. We continued to drive and got to Tampa but I did not have my directions with me so we pulled off the freeway and into a service station and a taxi cab driver was filling up with petrol. I stopped and asked him for directions and he told me the correct way.

Due to all the time lost this morning we were way late for the game and I dropped the others at the front of the stadium and went to find somewhere to park the car. I ended up only about 600 yards from the stadium and when I had walked back Barry, Leanne and Ray were still waiting in line to buy tickets. The queue was still quite long and we waited about a half hour to get the tickets. Tampa have had trouble getting fans to come to the games but with all the games they have been winning lately it seems that they got caught short on ticketing for walk up's to todays game.

By the time we got into the stadium the game was into the fourth innings. The stadium is an indoor stadium, total enclosed to the outside elements, this obviously helped today as it was quite windy outside with the effects of Cyclone Gustav starting to effect the region. We found our seats which were along the first base line about 20 yards past first base. We were only 11 rows from the front right behind the Tampa pitching warm-up area.

Tampa are having their best season since they started in the competition and are surprise leaders in their division and look destined to a playoff position. The game was quite good for the Tampa fans and they won 11 – 1. The stadium has plenty of team merchandise and concession stands underneath the stadium, which you can walk all the way around during the game.

The drive back to Orlando was pretty uneventful and on return we arranged for 8 of us to go out to dinner on International Drive which is the main tourist stretch along the hotel strip just south of the city. We asked for a mini bus to seat 8 but a smaller minivan turned up and would only fit 7 in it. So Barry, Leanne and I waited for another taxi cab to arrive which took 30 minutes to arrive. When we arrived the restaurant we were going to go to was closed (we later found out that they had gone into receivership). The other 5 were nowhere to be found and we looked for them for 20 minutes in some other restaurants before deciding to go to an English Pub that was next door to the original place we were going to go.

After dinner we looked in some tourist shops and then went back to the resort for some much needed sleep.

Orlando Day 8 - Monday

I slept right through to 10.30 this morning and then got up and did some laundry. Today is a public holiday for Labor Day in the USA. I then rang the shuttle service I will be using tomorrow morning to get to the airport. After this I went to Walmart again and found some more Pringles cans for my collection and also went to a factory outlet store down the road from there and purchased some souvenirs. By this time it was about 5.30pm and we had arranged to go out to dinner at 6.30 so I caught a taxi cab back and met the others at the bar.

Bob and Cia have to get a taxi cab tomorrow morning at 4.15am to start off home to Adelaide so we just went to a local Irish pub called Frankie Farrell’s. On the walls of the pub was some memorabilia and Bob purchased a Bob Dylan item with his autograph on it that will be posted home for him from the pub. We had some food and then a couple of drinks before heading back to the resort.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get everything into my bags to travel to Las Vegas tomorrow and it was midnight before I finally got it all packed. The suitcase is absolutely jammed packed but does have a foam box in it which I will be able to post once I get the hire car on Thursday and am able to find a post office.

It was then time to get some sleep and get ready for Vegas.