Whew!
I just finished catching up with all the posts I missed while at the Chicago Show - more than 75 pages! And, yes, I read them all; it took me three evenings.
The show was great. It was wonderful to reconnect with all those I’ve met and known over the years since that first show back in the 1990s. And it was fun meeting some of the denizens of this Forum face-to-face.
Although I spent most of the weekend at my Registration table post, and helping where needed, I enjoyed a few pipes in the smoking tent.
Two memorable smokes included sharing a bowl with a few of my CPCC buddies on Friday, particularly my old friend and fellow “original member” Jim York (there are only about a half dozen of us left). I smoked some Drama Reserve in a GBD Fantasy Dublin 864 that J. T. Cooke meticulously restored for me, back in the day.
The second smoke was on Saturday afternoon with my good friend Alex Florov, his friend Ping Zhan and some of Ping’s colleagues. I enjoyed a bowl of my “Dino’s Mixture” in my Peterson POTY 2002 bulldog with a silver spigot that my wife bought me at the Dublin Grafton store during our trip to Ireland in 2002.
It was a weekend of great conversations, pipe and tobacco talk, camaraderie and just plain fun.
Thank you to all who came to our show!
I hope to see y’all next year.