For the past 30 years or so, I’ve taken a week each summer and traveled to the American West with a group of buddies from college for a camping trip that, somewhere along the way, we dubbed Wildboy.
Not all of us make it every year — real life gets in the way now and again — and our destination varies, although we’re almost always in either Wyoming, South Dakota or Colorado, but it’s always a highlight of the year for all of us and a testament to friendships that were forged more than three decades ago.
When we first started these excursions, the name was totally appropriate; Wildboy featured plenty of mountain biking, rock climbing, kayaking and hiking, coupled with lots of time drinking beer around the campfire and telling old college stories for the 200th time.
We still do plenty of the latter — we’re not savages, after all — but as we’ve gotten older and a little less, well, wild, we’ve tamed our ambitions accordingly. But those changes haven’t dampened our enthusiasm for our annual wilderness reunion. It’s still one heck of a good time.
About the only point of contention that ever comes up about this week in the woods is the path we take to get where we’re ultimately going. Some among us prefer the road less traveled, an itinerary that is heavy on two-lane state highways and lengthy stops at antique malls and roadside attractions. Others of us (yours truly included) are laser focused on taking the shortest distance between points A and B, a route heavy on interstate highways and the fastest, most-efficient stops possible.
Thankfully, most of the disagreements about these matters end up being good-natured, but that doesn’t mean that figuring out a happy medium doesn’t take some serious planning and way more time than it should. And I was reminded of these two very different approaches to our version of the Great American Road Trip as we were working on this issue of LM and putting together the package of stories on Equip Exposition 2025, which is Oct. 21-24 in Louisville, Ky.
The concept for this issue’s cover story was pretty straightforward; as a tie-in to the start of another football season, we wanted to put together a game plan for how to get the most out of attendance at the big show, leaning on the experience and advice of industry pros who had been there before to counsel those heading to Equip Expo for the first time.
And as you’ll see in the story that begins on page 14, there are different schools of thought on how to accomplish that, just like the differences in opinion on how best to get me and my buddies to our annual camping trip. Some of the landscapers and lawn care operators that LM spoke with swore that advanced planning and a dedication to sticking to that plan pay the biggest dividends. These are people I can get on board with.
But there were others who touted the benefits of heading to Louisville with more of an open mind and a flexible agenda. They weren’t advocating for a complete absence of a plan, mind you, but they did point out that there were positives from just hitting the trade show floor and taking it all in, seeing what treasures might be around the next corner.
To be fair, there is probably merit in both approaches, just like there is probably at least a little merit into the wandering ways of my compatriots — after all, even my friends who take their sweet time getting to our camping trip eventually do get to our campsite. I’m sure those who take a less-structured approach to Equip Expo get as much out of the experience as those who come into the event with a solid plan of attack and a solid checklist.
So, regardless of how you approach road trips or your visits to conferences and trade shows, I think you’ll learn a lot from our reporting on Equip Expo, including the feature about the 12 educational sessions that LM is presenting this year in partnership with the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute. I hope to see many of you in Louisville next month.
