Announcing The 2013 National Hot Dog Month Tour

July is only a month away and that means it's almost time for The 2013 National Hot Dog Month Tour! Each day in July, a different hot dog joint will be featured.

The 2013 National Hot Dog Month Tour Schedule

This year, the tour will feature all new hot dog joints! There may be a few "old friends" featured, but they will have to have a new "twist" to be included in the National Hot Dog Month Tour. 

The geographic reach of the tour is expanding too. This year, there will be hot dog joints from Florida, New Jersey, California, and all six New England states. I am also possibly going to New York for a trip too!

Each year, the tour gets a little bigger. I hope to do a National Tour some day and hit iconic hot dog joints in every state (can't wait to try Hawaii)!

As usual, all my adventures will be video taped and displayed on Hot Dog Stories and The Hotdogman Channel on Youtube.

If you have a suggestion for a hot dog joint in New England, New York, or California (San Fran area), please let me know in the comments. I can't guarantee I'll visit this year, but it's nice to have a good list!

Here's a video preview of the tour.

If you like Hot Dog Stories, please consider helping out with some gas money for our journeys. Every little bit helps!

National Hot Dog Month Tour 2012 Seeks Funding

With only six weeks to go until National Hot Dog Month, my team and I are still seeking funding to make the project happen. We have secured new camera equipment and some corporate sponsors, but we still need one very important thing to make it happen: GAS MONEY!

We are also looking for lodging in Old Orchard Beach and/or Wells, Maine for a mid-week run through some Maine establishments. If you own an Inn, hotel or motel and can spare a couple of rooms mid-week, we will shout about you from the rooftops and list you as a tour sponsor! We are also accepting tee-shirts, hats and other promotional items to hand out along the way. If you have promotional items you'd like to see on the tour, contact me.

Seriously, we are going to 31 venues (there are two cook-outs on the tour) and shooting 31 videos plus doing 31 write ups AND we'll have some supplemental videos as well. Once the tour is over, we are going to pour through the hundreds of hours of footage from last year and this year and put together a 60-90 minute, feature length documentary. I will also be producing a book about the experience.

One of the best things we do is bring publicity to small business people who are in the hot dog business. The media attention and exposure these joints get really helps them. It is a lot of fun doing the tour, but it's also a lot of work. There are literally weeks of planning and during July, the tour is a 24 hour a day job.

This year, Drew Bennet from the Benspark Blog is the official tour photographer and videographer. Adding another person to the team doubles the travel expenses as we both have to travel from our homes to each location every day. We just need some help with the gas and in turn, we will give you gobs of publicity- if that's what you desire. If you want to remain anonymous, that's OK too.

Click HERE to find out more about the film.

Update on National Hot Dog Month 2012

While the rush to fund the National Hot Dog Month 2012 tour has not resulted in an initial public groundswell, lots has been happening behind the scenes.

I have forged two traditional media partnerships (one newspaper and one TV station) with negotiations in process for additional partnerships. These partnerships guarantee mass exposure for the tour which results in many more eyeballs to the tour and the websites. This presents a unique marketing opportunity for companies that wish to be associated with the tour; for relatively short money (compared to traditional marketing channels) a company can sponsor the tour and get exposure for their brand for the entire month.

I am also very pleased to announce the addition of Drew Bennet to the team. Drew runs the Benspark blog and has a very dedicated following. He's also an accomplished photographer and videographer; Drew will be handling most of the video recording and photography for the tour. He's also working on getting General Motors to give us vehicles to travel around in. You may recall, he scored a Camaro convertible for our visit to Larry Joe's New England Fire Pit last summer.

I have also decided to focus primarily on the iconic hot dog establishments of New England- places that have a 50+ year history- for at least half of the visits. We will also attend more baseball venues, particularly if certain deals that are in the works fall into place. GM would like the "baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet" angle as would several local minor/collegiate baseball leagues in New England I have been in contact with. Of course we will have a few carts, trailers and trucks in line, just not as many. We are also going to limit "repeat visits" this summer- no offence to past participants, we just want to keep the content fresh.

Check back for further updates.