Welcome to Florida

Scot and I arrived late last night in the Orlando airport. It took quite awhile before we got our rental car as I forgot which company we booked it from and my phone had temporarily crashed. Luckily my wife was next to a computer at home and gave us some ground support. After a long line which seemed like every other customer had a special request that took them twice as long as they should have, we settled into a nice Toyota Rav4. Definitely a good amount of space for our giant cooler full of pies.

For those that have been wondering, the pies arrived in perfect shape! We brought over 20 pies to compete with, and only 5 flavors. We need to submit two pies, one for display and the other for the judges to eat. We also need to have two backup of each flavor just in case a problem happens when baking them off. So yeah, 5x4 equals 20 pies! We are competing with what "we" think are the best pies; ollalieberry, strawberry-ollalieberry, strawberry-rhubarb, pumpkin, and pecan. The cooler we brought on the plane just barely passed regulation. The weight was a little over so we took out the aluminum foil and pie buttons.

Thats all for now, we're heading off to the pie conference, where there will be a speech by the president of the American Baker's Association. This afternoon we head off to a local high school where we will bake off the pies! We submit them tomorrow morning at 6am for judging, hopefully the jet lag won't prevent us from waking up:)

We will have more to report and photos later this evening.

Tony Stumbaugh
Pie Dude
Beckmann's Bakery

p.s. In case you were wondering, the above photo is the power lines outside of Disney World. Pretty surreal to see how ingrained into the local community it is to involve having their logo be used to support power lines.