This Year's Fair Parade

Once again, it's Fair season and another Fair parade has come and gone.

Like always, this year's parade was held on Thursday afternoon. Unlike always, it rained for about the first third of the parade - and unfortunately, they didn’t cancel it. I guess it takes things like lightning strikes before they cancel something like this. Though ironically, if there were lightning strikes, it would probably make the parade more interesting (especially if they made the marching politicians wear metal hats - not the tin foil kind they usually wear. These hats would have to be copper).

Fortunately, the rain seemed to thin out the crowd of annoying onlookers (not counting us). And I can't say whether it was due to the rain or not, but this year continued the recent trend of the declining clown-to-parade watcher ratio, so that was nice to see (or, not see). Bad weather, shortage of lead-based clown makeup - whatever the reason, fewer clowns = fewer clowns. That’s all that matters.

I'm only going to post this one photo for your viewing pleasure. It's pretty much all you need to see in order to capture the Fair parade excitement. Years ago, I used to take a ton of photos at the parade - and this was back when I had to pay, not only for film, but also for the processing. This photo is one of a total of only five photos I took this year. This is a pretty low amount but it beats my grand total of only three photos taken last year. You may be wondering, does this mean that this year's parade was more interesting than last year's parade? Answer: No.

This particular photo, like the other four, was taken near the end of the parade. This was during the exciting Grand Finale! The Grand Finale makes up approximately the last twenty to twenty-five percent of the parade (my estimate- not official) and, as in recent years, it seems to consist of a caravan of nothing but business vehicles - vehicles such as oil delivery trucks and home repair guys (and, presumably, gals). Though, as I’m writing this, I’m realizing that unlike in years past, there were no Coca-Cola delivery trucks! Apparently, the Parade Committee has completely lost touch with the Common Man (and Woman)!

Anyway, as this Coca-Cola-less caravan approached, I asked Sam if he wanted to get going. No dice. He wanted to stay until the bitter end (my words, not his). This, despite my subtle encouragement, prefacing the question with comments such as, “Well, looks like that’s the end coming up! Nothing but trucks!” and “Boy, I can't wait to get home and get out of these wet clothes!” But, as I said - no dice. We stayed till the very end.

In Sam’s defense, he gets to see a few people he knows. These are mostly folks from his school years - which makes him happy. So, all in all, I guess this makes the parade worthwhile - for both of us.

Oh! I did learn one interesting new parade fact this year. Given the choice between having to smell the wet horses, which stopped in front of us at one point, versus having to smell the diesel spewing trucks, which also stopped in front of us at one point, Sam would opt for having to smell the diesel spewing trucks - though this took a good bit of thought before he could commit to which of these odors was more offensive.

Figured I would pass this along for future reference.