[Sca-cooks] Sign of the Times perhaps --Dinner at Crown - cancelled

[Johnna Holloway]

Part of the trouble of course is that the dates for Midrealm Spring 
Crown/Kingdom A&S finals are inflexible.
It's now Memorial Day weekend, with a site needed for both Saturday and 
Sunday
and the feast is now Sunday night. So you need something like a 
conference center or
fair grounds, huge cooperative school, or a huge hotel just as Avelyn 
has already mentioned.
You can't bid a weekend earlier in May or a weekend in June to save money.

If you rent another hall and do the feast in another place, you still 
have deal with having people
make their way across town. (But it's been done in the past and the 
Crown feast that I did in Starleaf Gate
was in fact in a hall across town. I never saw the day event site so I 
can't say what it was like.)
We've also used some university sites in the past and cooked the feast 
in a church hall.
(The first major Crown that I baked for was in May 1974. It was done on the
University of Illinois campus on the last day of finals. Fighting was 
held in the stock pavilion
with the feast in the McKinley foundation's great hall. They did a 
double elimination list
with something like 50-60 fighters that day too.This was not Memorial 
Day weekend.)
This was of course before A&S was attached to the event. That requires 
the equivalent of another
event and another day added to an already major event.

Both Coronation and Crown ended up
being in Kentucky this year and that might have dampened the enthusiasm 
of heading
to both in the same state and again as I stated earlier the high 
gasoline prices may be
dampening the travels of some. Site fees were also an additional
$10 for adults for the two days; $8 for 13-17; $5 for 6-12.
Rooms ran $79-$89 per night.

I mis-spoke about gas being a high of $4.09 here in town. It was 
actually already
$4.35 last evening at the two stations near the interstate.

Johnnae

Avelyn Grene wrote:
> Having very recently worked in a hotel/conference center/catering 
> facility similar to the one where Crown is being held, I see both 
> sides of the problem.
>
> Finding an easily accessible site in the Cincinnati area, that can 
> hold 4-600 people, and all of the different activities  we hold for 
> our Spring Crown (which includes Kingdom A&S) is certainly not an easy 
> task, and sites that can accommodate this are few and far between, and 
> generally limited to fairgrounds (which require a whole lot more  work 
> and planning) and conference centers (at least from what I have seen 
> in this area).  From an SCAdian point of view, this is one of the 
> easiest ways to ensure that everything should work out the way you 
> need it to, as you have basically hired a site to do everything for you.
>
> This does come with drawbacks (food wise):
> I hope that made sense - I am usually asleep by now...
>
> Avelyn
>
>