- I'm unsure whether I can get the time off from work (I'm still working weekends), so it might have to take place solely on weekdays, much like the Baltimore/Philadelphia trip in 2006.
- If I did get a weekend off, the last weekend of August is out because it is Labor Day weekend (the holiday falls on Monday, September 1st). We all know that the resulting crowds in the stations and the lack of affordable hotel rooms (if any) would pose a problem.
- Moving to any earlier weekends in August might put it too close to our return from Florida in July. Financially this might be an issue to some.
If we are to do anything in August of 2008, planning really needs to get underway now, since it will closely follow the Florida trip. So for my purposes, I need to know what everyone's feelings are on this before I start working on possible plans. We also need to determine whether anything we do in August would replace a fest the following January, or be in addition to it. Don't expect a BARF 2009 as those events have been; if everyone still wishes to get together in the cold we would again be doing commuter rail, albeit much shorter days than possible in August.
The only other possibility for January 2009 would be to do a fill-in subway fest for those who might have missed one of our other AppleFests or Big Apple RailFests (BARF) in the past 8 years. It would be a program of miscellaneous subway lines, going out to various endpoints that somebody might have missed before or not travelled with us when we did it as a group. That event would be known as the Big Apple All Request RailFest, or BAARRF!
Now conisdering all of the above, the reason for the poll questions should be clearer to you.