There is a large motorcycle swap meet that occurs twice yearly in Keene, NH. They've had a spring and fall swap meet every year for the last 33 years. Well my brothers and I have accumulated various motorcycle parts over the years and thought it would be a good idea to get a table at this swap meet to sell some of these parts. We called the guy who runs this meet and asked him a couple a questions. He was pretty gruff with my brother Rob. He just said show up at 6:00AM on 9/28. First come first serve for a space and it's $45 bucks.
OK, we load up my truck and headout to this shindig on Sunday morning. It's about an hour and half drive from my house in Windham. We get there and there is a long line of U-hauls, trailers, trucks and vans waiting to get into the fairgrounds. I'm a little intimidated but the line starts moving and before we know it we get to the front. We pay our vendor fee of $50 (charged us $5 extra cause we had 3 guys in the truck). Then we pull into the fairgrounds and start to jockey for our spot. We end up getting a spot in the pavillion. There was plenty of space to setup our stuff. I had brought a folding table and 3 folding chairs. We organize the stuff we think is going to sell on the table and put pricing labels on a bunch of items. Pricing this stuff turned out to be useless. These guys haggled over the smallest of crap. Well 9:00 cames and they let the customers into the meet.
Let me just say that this meet was 99.99% Harley stuff. My brothers did pretty well because that's what they were selling. I did ok because I had some Harley mirrors and some ignition wires for Harley but they didn't want my Triumph or Suzuki parts. This show was completely focused on old Harley stuff. Normally I don't have any issues with Harley folks. However, at this show I had some unusual encounters with these folks. I took a lot of ribbing for my Triumph stuff and my Triumph hat. Way more than usual. OK, I can take it and these guys are just Harley snobs. Then we decide to take turns watching the table so we could look around at the other vendors tables. Since it was mostly Harley I volunteer to stay and watch the table and sell. My 2 brothers take off and they're gone about 30 mins. when they return they're just shaking their heads and laughing. Apparently, they ran into some real smart a$$e$ while shopping around. For example, they'd see an old Knuckle Head engine on the guys table and they ask how much for the engine. The guy would say, "it's not for sale" "Ha, Ha", no one sells old knuckle head engines. They'd see a shovel head and ask how much. The guys would laugh and say "it's not for sale." This happened over and over. It just wasn't engines or bikes but any rare part or accessory. It was if they liked busting guys balls. Kinda their badge of honor to display what they had and you couldn't get. Very strange mentality and it really started to get to my brothers. I just hung out at the table. We did manage to sell a lot of stuff because our stuff was actually for sale. This meet had a lot of One percenters of various affiliations and was little bit of an eyeopener for us. I'm not sure we'll rush back to this swap meet but learned a few things and made some cash so it wasn't totally bad.
