I could kick m'self in the arse for not having contacted you earlier, myself! My bad.
Thanks for your common-sense approach - in retrospect, and especially given your own sphere of interest, I expected nothing less from you. I agree with you about Beltring for all intents and purposes, on both counts actually; first, having slept on-site one visit and stayed at a B&B a half-hour away the next, the only difference I found was not waking up hung-over with a bunch of other, equally hung-over gibbering idiots. Well, that and parking, if you didn't arrive early enough - it's neither here nor there though, and certainly a moot point now.
We can get into their crass commercialisation etc in another conversation, but in a nutshell, that
was Beltring's big mistake, at least as viewed by many friends of ours. I tend to concur. Corowa has a long way to go until they reach that scope of operations - and perhaps they don't want to, an organisational nightmare I would think - but within the confines of the Ball Park, and that judged against the current size of the show, the
proportions are slowly getting there, and it's good to be able to 'think outside the box' well in advance. Again, though, we're treading into the sphere of a wholly separate topic here, but I
will say that I have every confidence, now knowing some of the players as I do, that this gorge can be spanned.
Re Corowa '08, I have every intention of joining your mob down there next year! We shall indeed keep in closer touch in the interim.
Jif