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Editor's corner

It's hard to believe we're in our 17th year of publishing our Leisure eNewsletter. Before that we published a snail mail newsletter named Leisure & Learning Alive for a number of years. That seems like just yesterday. It's amazing how fast we've moved from the analog to the digital world. Think about it. It's only been 11 years since Apple introduced the smartphone. How it has changed everything about the way we live, work and play, including how we decide what we do with our leisure time.

This month we have an interesting selection of articles for you covering the topics of food and drink, digital screen time, the changing composition of bowlers, why the baby bust continues, why we brail the current and future leisure culture, the rise and appeal of festivals and fun down on the farm. We report on meaningful and important information to the leisure destination industry you won't find in any other publication.

Speaking of farms, and more specifically our company's agritainment/agritourism work, I really enjoy visiting our farmer clients. I often have some interesting experiences, such as when I visited our client of the past 24 years, Davis Farmland. They have an incredible collection of animals including Peanuts the camel. Peanuts has learned how to take the guest's feed cups in her mouth, take feed out of it, and then return the cups to the customers, empty of course. Here's a very short video of my encounter with Peanuts.

I'm heading back in October for their Davis Mega Farm Festival, a food, beer, wine and music festival. We've started doing a lot of work with our clients on limited time events, food and drink LTOs and festivals. As we discussed in the May-June article The demise of repeat appeal and this issue's The rise of festivals as competition to community-based entertainment venues, the old business model of attractions driving repeat appeal no longer works. To stay on top of the festival industry, we recently joined the International Festivals & Events Association and will be attending their convention in October.

Hoping you have an enjoyable and restful rest of the few days left of summer.

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