This past weekend was rather interesting, for me anyway. The Miami Pen show was in town, and I decided I would attend, since it is not very far from my home. This was my first pen show I have ever attended, and while it was rather small. I enjoyed it immensely. The event was held at the Marriott on Biscayne Blvd, and was held for three days.

I am a member of FPN, and as such I met up with a few of the other FPN members that were in attendance. I hung out with “Speckled & Spotted”, “Okami”, “OcalaFLGuy”, “pb2”, “sumgaikid”, Bert from Bertrams Inkwell and various other FPN members.

I visited all the vendors, chatted pens and inks. I bought some Noodler’s VMail Midway Blue, Noodler’s Year of the Pig highlighter ink and a Stipula LTD Miami Sunset pen. While I was there I brought an old Watermans Ideal FP to Mike Masuyama (Mike-It-Work) to check the nib. I also spent time with Chuck Swisher & Susan Wirth. Susan spent a nice amount of time with me explaining some of the finer points of fountain pens. While at her booth, I looked at Flex, Italics and some Broad nibbed pens. At pb2’s booth, I took some video as Pendleton opened a vintage NOS Esterbrook from the UK.

I drooled over the new Visconti Homo Sapiens fountain pen. Which looked and felt awesome, but at $600 was “slightly” out of my price range. I looked at many of the vintage pens that were available for sale. I actually prefer mostly the older stuff since, I find much of the newer FPs a bit gaudy. Plus, there is just something about writing with a vintage pen… they sing to you.

The one gripe I had was parking. I read on the website that parking was $10. Not for me, I was told to park in the lot directly across the street. Come to find out that was a $30 lot. I would have much rather spent the $30 on some more ink. 😉

After the show, OcalaFLGuy, Speckled & Spotted, Sumgaikid and I spent the evening at Bayside… eating chatting and relaxing. I had a great time with them, and hope that we can all get together again soon.