Gift of The Small Town

I've read several times in the Etsy Forums about the joys and sorrows of Craft Markets or Fairs, both outdoor and now in...and I have a doozey-I just went through possibly the worst craft fair experience of my 30 years of craft-fairing, and I have had a few...and yet, heartwarming, in an ironic sort of way...

To begin with, I hate being upstairs in halls, schools, etc. because your foot traffic is automatically cut in half..but I had no choice yesterday, since it was a four day fair, and I was only doing the Sunday, which is normally the best day...but there was nothing "normal" about this fair...
I was told to pull behind the building, because there was a ramp that led directly to the top floor to make it easier to load and unload my stuff...well, unbeknownst to me, there was a right side and a wrong side..guess which one I took...
A muddy morass awaited me, after our heavy rains, and a large abandoned set of steps that led nowhere, right in the middle of the "lane", so I tried to back out down the lane, but of course all my stuff was piled in the back of my truck so I couldn't see, so I started to turn around...got stuck in some very deep mud, where the drainpipe emptied from the gutters.
Eventually after several people tried to push me out, we called a tow truck.
I decided to set up and wait, why stand around outside..so I did that, and when he came, went out to "help".
When it came time to pay him, I was shocked to learn that he didn't take plastic...having only a cash float of $20 and out in the middle of nowhere, I didn't know what to do..
Luckily, he was a nice guy in a small town, and asked me to pay another seller at the fair who he was familiar with, and he took off...
Breathing a sigh of relief (only temporary, I assure you) I sat back and waited for the hordes of Christmas shoppers to descend richly upon us...
 Apparently, they had somewhere else to go...in 6 hours I doubt if thirty people passed through our little upstairs room, and none of them were buying, at least not from me...
Had this been a large town, I would have been in trouble, the equivalent of not paying for a restaurant meal after the food has been consumed..but this is a place where everyone knows everyone (except me)-and since I live here,  am somehow to be trusted... of course, in a large town, not only would the bill have been much larger, but they would of course have taken plastic-and I've never had a bigtown fair where I've sold nothing...
Still kinda nice that I will be paying the driver the balance when he's "in the neighborhood", and I was automatically assumed to be an honest and upright person.
Naive? You bet...but perhaps I'm assuming they can't judge properly, since they're small town folks...maybe I'm selling them a bit short-because after all, I am an honest person...maybe I'm the one with the problem.

This is a bad season for craft fairs generally-economics, The N1H1 scare, and the sheer drawing power of the malls screaming  *SALES!!!!*  for months in advance..but I learned an expensive lesson yesterday...that, despite the wrong choice of back lanes. I had made the right choice, moving to a small town on a wonderful Island, after all....