Tampa and Orlando

Our first load out of Gainesville was a predictably painful 13 hours. We finished around 5:30AM, slept until 8:30, got on the road at 9AM and arrived in Tampa 2 hours later in time to check into our hotel and walk across the street for our noon load in.

The Tampa PAC is huge with a 4 truck dock and it took us two days to load in. But fortunately, once we were in we had plenty of room for this kind of silliness...

We had a decent week in Tampa with lots of work calls. I don't think the electricians or the carpenters had a single day where they weren't working all day. And of course, none of us has had a full day off for about 3 weeks now. But we survived our first 5 show weekend and then loaded out of Tampa in about 7.5 hours, finishing again around 5:30AM and crawling into the bus to drive the 2 hours to Orlando.

Our call was 5PM to start load in to Orlando but then we realized that this was going on right next door to the Bob Carr theatre...

So we grabbed lunch and got to the theatre early to try to avoid the traffic jams caused by this madness...

Lots and lots and lots of people showed up to hear Obama and Clinton talk.

It's good to know that the fine people of Florida are still fans of the electoral process after the debacle of the past few elections.

I would classify the mood of the rally as very calm and up beat. People stood for HOURS in lines that stretched probably for miles to get into the arena space.

We walked around and took pictures and then stood in our loading dock and watched the hoardes of people milling around. Kinda fun to be sideline to that kind of historical situation.

The load in to Orlando was rougher than Tampa cuz the space is much smaller. Somehow they have put the entirety of The Lion King into this space and Wicked got in only cutting one drop. When asked how that was even possible, one stagehand said "with a really big shoehorn..."

And the loading dock kind of sucks
Since you have to ramp down off the truck.
Load out will be painful, pushing all those crates and coffins up a ramp into the truck. However, they do have two loading docks, one on each side of the theatre, so you can theoretically load two trucks simultaneously, or at least be loading one and getting the other into position at the same time.

But that's a problem for a different day, like Sunday. Meanwhile, we have another 5 show weekend coming up.

look! it's a munchkin free post! More about them later...