Why are we in the US?

It all started last September. Megan went to a meeting of Montessori teachers and learned through the grapevine that an online Montessori Materials business was up for sale.
For the past 3 years we have worked pretty much exclusively with W.L. Gore teaching people who sell GORE-TEX® products how to sell said products. It is fantastic work and takes us all over the country meeting fantastic people and we can just barely squeak by a living by working this job for 6 months and then traveling for the other 6.
However, we will need a little more stability and perhaps a little more income in the future and besides, the outdoor industry is my passion, not Megan's.
So when the opportunity to plug back into the Montessori community but not having to be in the classroom full time presented itself, Megan became very excited.
We hemmed and hawed over the wisdom of owning an online business since neither of us know too much about it and for sure it would be much more work than we could anticipate.
But in late November we bucked up and bought the business. This post talks a bit more about it.
Starting tomorrow, the annual AMS Montessori conference starts in Chicago. 2600 Montessori teachers from around the US will converge at the Marriott for 4 days of Montessori Mayhem. Part of this conference includes an area for vendors to hawk their goods. We can't pass up this opportunity so for the past 4 months we have been prepping for this conference while in Seattle and on the road. During the evenings of the moto trip, we would both hunker down in front of our computers and work on things like a catalog, pricelist, figuring a way around the $100/ day internet convenience fee that Marriott charges... things like that.
So here we are in Chicago for the next week. We had 18 boxes of goodies sent to Chicago and they are now spread out all around our hotel room. Tomorrow at 6 am we will jump into a taxi with everything and roll down to the Marriott. We will have 5 hours to set up our booth (hopefully the display materials show up at the Marriott- that vendor actually has a booth at the show and he said he will bring them to us) before settling down for 4 days of selling.
We have no idea how this will go. We could be out a lot of money, we could break even, or we could actually profit somehow. I'm at least hoping for the middle choice.
Either way, we will learn a lot. We will learn how to be more efficient at future conferences. We will learn how to sell to Montessorians. We will get to meet our customers face to face. We will see where we can grow, and places where we can cut back.
Then, in a week, we will be back in Santiago.

Here we go!