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The Pioneer Woman in Salt Lake City

November 12th, 2009 · 4 Comments · a day in the life, random, tina


The picture above (taken by Missy Drummond) was posted on The Pioneer Woman’s blog! How cool is that!!!!

How many of you follow The Pioneer Woman’s blog?
(http://thepioneerwoman.com)

I started reading it about 2 years ago after seeing something about it on a photography forum. And I’ve been captivated ever since.
The woman is talented writer/blogger with a vast number of topics to address. Some posts are humorous or absurd, others talk about life on the ranch, homeschooling, or home improvements, etc. She also has a section devoted to recipes and cooking, she has a series titled “Black heels to tractor wheels” where she chronicles her unlikely courtship to her husband, and frequent giveaways. You should check it out if you don’t already read her blog.

At any rate, The Pioneer Woman recently published a cookbook and went on tour around the country meeting people and signing books. One such event was held in Salt Lake City last week. I was on the fence about going since it was a 2 hour drive and we were right in the middle of closing on our construction loan… kind of a busy time. But then Michelle called me, and basically said, “I’ll go if you go.” Michelle and I have been trying to get together for the past several months, so I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to hang out with her and see PW all in the same night.

Fast forward to that night…

The gallery was scheduled to open at 6:30 for a 7:00 presentation by Ree (Pioneer Woman). We got there about 6:00 and there were already 200+ people ahead of us – some having arrived earlier than 4:00. The gallery was packed wall to wall. It was standing room only. So far, not too different than what I expected.

Around 7:30 they started book signing at the neighboring Kings English bookstore. Everyone was assigned a slip of paper with a letter on it. We were to form a line with our letter was called… 20 A’s, 20 B’s, etc… Michelle and I were assigned the letter “J,” but letters were assigned through “R” and there were still a couple hundred people that showed up late, were not assigned letters and stood outside in the cold waiting until the end to see if Ree was still up for signing books. At 8:30 (one hour in) they were still on the letter “C.”

The Kings English bookstore is small, and although it looked to be a pretty cool store, it wasn’t prepared for the mass amounts of people that this event brought in. Most people waited outside for hours for their turn to come in an meet the woman of the hour. We were among them until someone told us that there was a room inside where we could go to keep the babies out of the cold.

That’s when things started to get interesting…

First… Missy came and took our picture! It was great to meet Missy. She was a very kind and down to earth woman. We visited for several minutes before she asked us how far we’d driven to get here, how old the babies were, etc… She quickly had compassion on us realizing that the babies were getting tired and we still had a long wait ahead of us. Before long were were being whisked to the front of the line an allowed to meet PW and get our books signed.

It all happened so quickly. We were not allowed to pose for pictures with her, or visit for any length of time at all really. The staff at the bookstore were doing their best to push us through like a herd of cattle (ha, reference intentional). Ree barely had a chance to look up from her signing before we were being sent on our way. It was wild. I know that there were a lot of people to process and I am grateful that we were allowed a hint of priority (or the babies were at least), but I guess I was hoping to get 3 or 4 minutes at least to say “Hi.” Alas.

Oh… on the way out we also asked Missy to sign our books. I’m glad she did. 🙂

I’d say it was a fun evening and I’m glad I went. And I might even do it again. But I think there would be a few things I did differently next time.

Here are some more images from that night:

Oh, by the way…
If you want to witness our 5 seconds of fame on PW’s blog you can check it out here: http://thepioneerwoman.com/blog/2009/11/a_recap/
(Note: The image itself can be found on PW’s flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pioneerwoman/4088475482/)

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