Happy 4th!

We staggered out of bed bleary-eyed for our date with the Saxton’s River Parade. Well, I staggered. Kevin might have leapt with a war cry, for all I know.

Yeah, I don’t know what’s wrong with the camera phone – I mean, sure, it’s a camera phone, so it’s of limited quality – I think it just doesn’t like facing into the sun. You’ll see that nearly all of today’s pictures are like this. Let’s think of it as a feature, not a bug. As in,  “Hey! Look at my cool pictures! They all come with rainbows!”

At any rate, that’s the Saxton’s River – it runs parallel to Main Street. That’s a fire truck, loading up water for subsequent crowd spraying. We’re on our way to the parade, portable chairs in tow.

Sadly, I managed to nuke more than half of my pictures while transferring them to my laptop. Grrrr. So you won’t see the folks in uniform, the Hummers, the fife-and-drum contingent, the old cars (including a cherry red ‘62 corvette…lust…), the eclectic gourd orchestra, or the kids on stilts. Sob!

You will see, however…

Our friend Kathleen, who’s a Morris Dancer.

Do other parades have this? Teensy orchestras on a truck bed?

How about rock and roll by kids wearing…uh…I think he’s in his boxers. I wonder if the drummer is wearing anything. It was a hot day…

Every parade’s gotta have a transvestite on roller blades, dancing with a dummy.

You can’t make this stuff up.

 

My parade swag: a fresh carrot, and a baggie of snap peas.
From a float for a local farm.

A couple of sets of draft horses. Uh oh, this one’s lifting his tail…you know that that means, right?

Yep, we were sitting right where all beasts chose to relieve themselves.

Including this little one, who is apparently the mascot for… 

… our community radio station.Don’t bother looking for it on your dial unless you’re within about five miles of the transmitter. Click above to listen online, though…I love the internet…

 

Things wrapped up with a long train of ambulances and fire trucks. Ours are bright green, yay, us! Can you see he’s hosing down the crowd? Very welcome, indeed!

We left shortly thereafter, both of us overheated from our spot in the sun. So we missed the egg toss, which generally results in a block of pavement coated in broken eggs. This is generally followed by street water polo, in which teams of firefighters each man a firehose and push a volley ball around. It makes a huge mess, but it cleans up the broken eggs pretty effectively!

And here we are, on our way back to the car. The fire truck is emptying itself out, and a slew of kids are playing on the rocks and enjoying the water.

We took the long way home, meaning, we got kind of deliberately lost on some back roads – hard to do, when we live within four miles of the parade. But we managed!