Quote of the day: "You probably won't believe this, or perhaps you will, these were left in my bag from the Turkey trip" says our mixmaster Tom holding up a pair of obviously dirty socks from our Turkey trip in February...

The evening was spent going from room to room in the hotel as many carvers and retailers had set up little mini pipe shows in their room. I didn't spend as much time "prowling" as I would have liked as I was continuing to do work on the blog sites as well as continuing to move forward on the auction/classifieds/trading site that is the core of PipeTrader.

Tom found a Dunhill pipe that he liked enough to purchase. Hey Tom, I thought we were here to sell pipes, not buy pipes. Our pipes should arrive today via UPS so we'll set up an after dinner sale in our room.

Here's some photos from the "pre-show" sales that happened today (Friday):

 
Looking over the floor shortly after opening

One of our regulars, James, a budding carver, puruses a vendor's wares.

Another customer Marty chats with another vendor.

Here's a shot of the in-room setup for our after dinner sale:

These are the higher end pipes. Note the ironing board as show surface. Any flat surface will do.

The middle piece is a Dunhill Space Shuttle. You'll notice a small pipe attached to the shank of the main pipe much like the space shuttle riding atop a 747 enroute back to  Florida from Edwards air base.

As I said, any flat surface will do.

This is our estate Dunhill and Savinelli display case.

And here is our Meerschaum and miscellaneous case.

 
I'm not sure where we found these but "The Pipe" dates from the late sixties to early 70's and is made of "space age materials" used in the development of the Polaris Missle!

I'm off to the dinner now so more for you all tomorrow!

MJG

Side note: Interesting Link of the day... Saw reference to this video in Wired magazine on the flight out and thought I'd link it here in case anyone cares to watch it. Very well done piece on Web 2.0 titled "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us".