It completely blows my mind that somehow I have done Oktoberfest twice. The first year, it was so scary and foreign to me, but once it was over, I was ready to do it all over again. A year later, and the 8th Annual Oktoberfest completely snuck up on us; I’m still in shock that it’s mid-October, and even more shocked that Oktoberfest is over for the year, yet again. Compared to last year, I felt like a completely different person going into this years event. I knew how the event would go, I knew exactly what I was doing, and I had no doubts that it was going to be another amazing experience with Peak Events. On set-up day, I was shocked at how smoothly it went. Despite a little bit of rain, we got almost everything finished and were out of the park before 7 PM. The next morning, though it was an early start, there was a lot of excitement. On set-up day and on the day of before the event started, I was in charge of the vendors. I needed to check them in, place them in their spot and accommodate any changes they needed. It sounds a lot easier on paper than it was. I redrew and rearranged each of the 20-25 vendors about three times before it was finally perfect. This was a little stressful for me because I knew I wanted to do a great job and really impress Mom and Jen, which I really I hope I did! I also thought it was a lot more fun than I expected it to be, I was fitting all the little pieces of a puzzle together to make it fit right, which is something I really enjoyed doing. After the vendors were all set, I had to head over to the entrance where I would be working ticket sales for the day. I don’t think anything could have prepared me for the chaos that was ticket sales. As soon as the gates opened and we began selling, it was a constant stream of people. It literally never ended. The gates opened at 11 AM which is when we started selling, and the first time that I had enough of a break to take a breath and check the time, it was already after 3 PM. I was in shock that it had gone by so fast. It felt like maybe two hours had passed, because we were so incredibly busy. We had about 5 minutes every once in awhile where there weren’t people constantly lined up to buy tickets. At about 6:30 PM, we stopped selling tickets, and just let people in for free since there wasn’t much time left. At this point, we got a chance to walk around the event and see the end of the contests and bands playing. As I was walking around the event, I thought about what Wheeler Park looked like the previous morning when we first arrived. It was a completely blank canvas, and 36 hours later, there was a huge event going on. As I though about this, I had this distinct feeling that this is truly what I love to do. It’s so easy to get caught up in preparing for the event that I don’t realize how truly INSANE it is that I get to be a part of something so amazing and special. It means everything to me, and with every event that passes, I become more and more grateful to be a part of such a wonderful team of people and do something that we all love with them.
Emily