I don't feel like this is a belated Independence Day post, because our little mountain town celebrates the holiday for two days. Most of the town turns out, lots of tourists come and there is red, white and blue, and good family fun everywhere.
Yesterday, we had a parade and foot races. I took the boys downtown (anyone who has ever been here would laugh at me for using that word) and joined the crowd waiting for the parade. There were quite a few people there (for our town) and everyone waited excitedly for the first parade entries to come down the street. This parade isn't exactly a modern marvel of planning, but it seems to work out just fine. The fire department and the Forest Service had various vehicles in the parade and everyone else just went down to the post office that morning and signed themselves up to walk in the parade. The parade consisted of fire trucks, an ambulance, Smokey Bear, kids on bikes, kids in wagons, kids with tennis rackets, kids with balloons, a few cars and trucks that were decorated, a girl in a pony cart that was being pulled by a very large goat, a one-horse carriage being pulled by an ATV and one family with the grown men dressed in bizarre costumes and pulling other costumed family members in a cart. There were other entries, but that gives a pretty accurate picture of the parade. Everyone loved it. In fact, they loved it so much, they got to see it twice! That's right. The parade went down the street, looped around and came back again. And all of this celebration took about fifteen minutes! Then the owners of the grocery store (who had been handing out free water to parade bystanders) brought out two enormous rolls of bubble packaging material. They rolled it out in the street and then all the kids ran out and popped the bubbles. As people were leaving the parade, lots of people moving in different directions with little attention to traffic flow, people followed the bubble wrap "carpet" and grown ups were popping it, too.
Later in the afternoon, there were foot races. Basically, all the kids who want to participate are grouped together with by age and each race consists of kids who are all the same age, starting with the one-year-olds. So, what might be a fierce competition when you get to the ten-year-olds, is more like trying to herd a bunch of squirmy kittens when it comes to the little kids. Imagine getting 4 or 5 one-year-olds (and there can be a really wide range of running abilities in this group) together, and trying to get them to start at one end of the race and run to the other. Whoever gets closest to the finish line first wins. The lucky winner gets a silver dollar and a blue ribbon. Quite the haul. This activity is repeated (though with slightly better prizes) several times to give all of the groups a chance to race. Some kid always ends up on his or her face with a scraped knee, and some of the little kids have no idea what they are doing, but overall it's an afternoon of fun for the whole family. I feel like I should add that there was an apple pie booth that was baking the pies on the spot and filling the air with a delicious aroma, and that the pie booth was next to the homemade vanilla ice cream booth, but sadly this was not the case. I guess I will just have to make that suggestion for next year.
Today there was a firemen's muster and a barbeque downtown in the afternoon, and tonight they are having a dance. First, there is line dancing for a couple of hours, lessons provided on the spot for non-line dancers, and then for the rest of the night (until midnight to 1 am-ish) there is a street dance. They did this a couple of weeks ago for Gold Rush Days as well. This is a town that likes the celebrating and the dancing! I am listening to the music and the laughter and it sounds like fun. I can't go tonight (husband at work and babies in bed), but I am looking forward to joining in next time!
Happy 4th of July!
