However, we did have a blast on our trip to Richmond on Saturday to see the taping of the long-running PBS television series Antiques Roadshow. Stupidly, I thought this would be a one-and-done kind of post. Remember how I thought I’d get the office makeover done in a week? Yeah, this is kind of like that. You might want to brace yourself for Antiques Roadshow Week here at Pies & Puggles.

For new readers, back in January, I went online and applied for tickets to the Richmond, Virginia taping of Antiques Roadshow. I found out in May that I had been selected to receive a pair of tickets. In my excitement, I quickly dashed off a blog post about it which the WGBH media relations folks saw on Twitter and I was subsequently invited to the show as press. If you’ve ever wondered what “gibbering in excitement” looks like over email, ask Doug to show you the message I sent him when I got that invitation.

First of all, if you’ve never seen Antiques Roadshow, the premise of the show is simple. Everyday folks bring family treasures and things they’ve found at yard sales, estate sales, antique stores and such to be examined by the Roadshow appraisers. The appraisers tell you what you have, give you dates and biographical information for the maker or manufacturer and tell you an approximate value of what your piece might be worth on the open market. 

Of course, everyone hopes that they’ve brought something worth millions. In practice, that seems to happen once or maybe twice per season. That’s out of 181,828 ticket applications for the 2013 tour, 8 tour stops, 3,000 pairs of tickets per tour stop and two items to be appraised per ticket. 

There is no buying or selling of items at the taping, just people bringing their pieces to be evaluated. I brought four items with me (two for me and two for Doug, though let’s be honest: they were all my picks). You can go back and read this post to see what I brought as well as my personal guesses at valuations of each item. 

So was I right? You’ll have to tune in on Wednesday to get the full report. Tomorrow I’ll do a little behind the scenes tour of the show and then later in the week I’ll follow up with the rest of our whirlwind trip to Richmond because we made several other stops along the way.

Have you seen Antiques Roadshow? If not, you can watch episodes from previous seasons online. Some of the things people bring in are truly amazing.

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