A report by the Morris (Ill.) Daily Herald indicates that attendance at the second annual Illinois Route 66 Red Carpet Corridor Festival was hurt by cold weather on Saturday, but it rebounded somewhat when the temperatures improved on Sunday.
And there’s sentiment to push the festival deeper into the summer months:
Several community members said they hope the committee goes back to a summer event next year, when there may be a chance of rain but the cold, windy weather wouldn’t be an issue. […]
“The fact that all these people came out and pulled together to put the event on makes it a success,” Cox said. “The weather is the only let down.”
He said they were also competing with several proms, including Gardner, Dwight and Morris’ proms, which he felt was holding some people back from coming out.
Cox said he would be talking with the organizers of the Red Carpet Corridor to see if he could persuade them to push the event back until warmer weather next year.
It appears attendance was better on Sunday, however:
As the weather turned nicer on Sunday, the numbers were better and more people could be found throughout the Route 66 Red Carpet Corridor.
Employees at the Joliet Visitor Center said they had about 25 people in the first hour on Sunday.
A Wilmington Route 66 store reported this weekend to be his busiest in three years.
But any festival organizer will tell you that Saturday is a much bigger money-making day for festivals than Sunday. For the festival to be successful, it needed better weather on Saturday.
I’m not sure that pushing the event back into the summer months would be all that viable because you’d be competing against other summer festivals in the region. But even rescheduling the Red Carpet from early May to late May could make quite a difference with weather conditions.
UPDATE: A report by the Pontiac Daily Leader was a bit sunnier:
“Yesterday was pretty chilly, PROUD’s Lori Fairfield said Sunday, “but the vendors said they actually did fairly well.” Store owners did well, as did restaurants, and “It was great having it downtown,” she said of the mix of entertainment, sales and food. […]
Officers of the Route 66 Association of Illinois staffing the museum on Sunday said they had a very good turnout, whether people driving the corridor or just visiting the museum. No one mentioned the price of gasoline as a factor in whether to make the trip, they said. […]
“I think the first day was pretty good attendance for the horrible winter weather that we had. We had quite a bit of crowds, the museums were full, they were happy with the turnout we had,” Pontiac Tourism Director Ellie Alexander said Sunday afternoon. “Our food vendors were busy all day long. I went in a couple of our restaurants here in town and you d couldn’t get a table in them so I would say that was a successful weekend of bringing people to Pontiac and showing them what we have. I haven’t talked to many of the other towns; I know weather was a factor in some of the and some of their vendors left. I was proud our vendors stuck out the bad day yesterday. Today we are going to reap the benefits of that. I see traffic is picking up as we speak.”
It should be noted that Pontiac probably would attract the most people from the festival, especially when the Illinois Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum is right downtown.
With the current gas prices, I wouldn’t mind several activities in close proximity scheduled for the same weekends.
That way, we could spend one day at one and another at another.
As it is, we live about a two hour drive from Dwight as our closest, non-traffic congested route on Illinois Highway 47. And even that is getting worse.