HOM: Gun Shows

Jerry put together a trip schedule that involved hopping from gun show to gun show, working out dates and places and available tables and coming up with somewhat of a paid winter vacation that covered most of the month of February. That was quite a feat in those days and meant using a LOT of different sources for dates, addresses, and information. If the Internet had existed things would have been a bit simpler. Most shows ran from opening around eight Friday morning for the dealers to set up till mid-afternoon Sunday when the public would be booted out and the dealers could start repacking. The idea was for us to spend the three day weekend at a show and then use the next four days for traveling to the next show and shopping/restocking/sightseeing along the way. One of the scheduling tricks was to get the itinerary set up with as little backtracking as possible and no over-long a transits between shows. We took several of these February trips, and I don't remember the exact itineraries of each one. Lyn was with me on parts of some but not others. I guess the last trip stands out better the earlier ones for various reasons, but I'll get to it later. All the trips started with the first weekend in Salt Lake City for the big Crossroads of the West show at the Salt Palace and residence at the Wagon Wheel motel nearby. 125,000 square feet of floor space filled with rows of 8' tables loaded with everything from candy to machine guns, with a few tanks and planes mixed in. This was my personal favorite of all the gun shows. At various times we hit Albuquerque, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles on these jaunts. TBC (Me) (Blacktail Books)