| Despite a full set of Craftsman wrenches being thrown into the works of this year's Missouri Photo Workshop, we pulled into town and started setting up the workspace just before midnight on Saturday. That even gave us an hour to check out one of the local drinking spots, the Bull Pen.
Not that we could linger there even long enough to hear Jakob sing karaoke. As soon as the two weddings at our hotel were over with, we started dodging drunk party lingerers with boxes and equipment. Too bad we couldn't get the bridal parties to help out. |  |
By the time the photographers started wandering in for registration on Sunday, the place looked as if we'd been there for two days already. All in all, it's gone pretty smoothly. Most of the participants have their story ideas approved now, though there are still a few wild-eyed photographers who are starting to look pretty panicked. Makes me feel happy to be on the organizational side of things.
I joined a couple of the volunteers on a run this morning and checked out Crystal City a little bit from a pedestrian point of view. I regretted not bringing my point and shoot along and vaguely recall having the same regret for last year's MPW in St. James. At least none of the Festus/Crystal City dogs seem to have a taste for runners, though perhaps they just have better fences and chains here than they did in St. James.
I heard tell that there's an early morning running group here like there is in Columbia, but since it's already past 1 here, I'm unlikely to look into that as a story idea tomorrow. It's something to follow up with though, as a possible element for the MPW book. I probably won't even run tomorrow at all, though I'm hoping to go Thursday with two possible goals in mind. 1. To find a path or road that leads down to the Mississippi River and 2. To plot a course that will actually spell out "MPW 61." It's a super-dorky tech oriented runner thing to do, but still, I'm amused by the idea of it. For what it's worth, today's run didn't spell anything. 
