What a day! Actually, things started Thursday night with the setup and preparation for Friday. The group of volunteers wrestled with banners and after some adjustments, things were ready to go. We had a good list of people contributing pies, but when we left Thursday night, only 10 pies had been delivered. Personally, I was a little worried.
Friday morning rolled around and I arrived at 6:30. Chair Plantz was already at the church and had made a couple of adjustments from the night before. We placed ice in the bins for the refrigerated pies and waited on more Rotarians to arrive and pies. We needed pies. Drop off time for pies was between 7AM and 8AM and pies steadily arrived. There were some early shoppers too, but we weren't quite ready to sell. By the time 8AM rolled around, all of the volunteers were in place and we had reached about 100 pies. I say about, because we still had pies arriving until around 10AM.
I didn't spend much time inside. I stood outside with John Haines and Ken Robinson, helping people carry their donated pies in and greeting pie buyers as they made their way inside. I also got to see many happy faces as they left with the pie of their choice; or the pie that chose them. I did head inside around 10:20 and we had 17 pies left. We hovered and discussed what we were going to do with 17 pies. As we had our discussion, a woman walked in with a list. As she gathered her pies another customer walked in. The first woman took 5 pies, leaving 12, and the next took 2, leaving 10. Our 17 was looking better. We now had 10 pies, 6 of which were pumpkin. Over the next 20 minutes, more customers trickled in and we ended up with 1 lone pie. Not bad for a days work.
Thank you to everyone who volunteered at the event. Thank you to everyone who brought pies. Thank you to John Haines for buying a pie to share at the meeting. And THANK YOU to the Pie Day Committee and Chair Brad Plantz for a successful event. We will be having a wrap up meeting soon and everyone is welcome to attend and share ideas. Heather Exby has some ideas for bringing a modified version of the slices back and I am sure there are lots of other ideas.