I do appreciate a good small-town festival. Do you like them?
When I was
growing up, our little town had a festival that ran until I was in college, and
then it kind of fizzled out. I always enjoyed going with Mom to the parade for
that one. (Fun fact: My mom worked in first grade for years and she was not
above shouting her presence to the kiddos on the parade floats in hopes of
getting pelted with candy. It usually worked. I was sometimes a casualty. Not
all kids have great aim.)
Then when we
lived at WillowBridge, we enjoyed the festival in that town – which was a fall
festival. Fall is a lovely time for festivals. So much cooler!
This year was
our first year to attend Swiss Days, and we dove in headfirst! Both of us were
in the parade, and Ryan joined the brat-eating contest. (I was terrified.
Competitive eating is the worst. Between risks of choking and barfing, it seems
like the worst idea in the world. But he was super excited about it.)
The night
before our day-o-involvement, we had a terrible storm. When we went to
bed, there was a decent amount of lightning taking place outside. And then
about 3 in the morning, the wind woke me up, and it sounded so fierce. Wind doesn’t
usually awaken me, so it was noteworthy that it did. The thunder rolled and the
lightning was so constant that it was more daylight than dark out there. I
could hear rain pelting the windows, and I woke Ryan up in a fat hurry, with no
regard for his sleep. It was that scary. He got up and looked outside
and said it was bad, but he didn’t think we were in danger of the house falling
down, so we tried to resume sleeping.
When we woke up
the next morning, I wondered if all the vendor tents at the festival had been destroyed.
They seemed to be okay by the time we went later in the day, so I was thankful for
that! (Also thankful for the free window-washing we received from that hard
rain.)
But the day of
the parade was stunning. Hot, but stunning.
Ryan’s
participation was to drive a golf cart for work, and he had a lot of fun doing
that!
I didn’t have a
real plan going into the adventure. I had to walk from his work to the parade
route, which was about a mile and felt like four miles in the heat. When I got
there, I found the local LifeWise program had a bus and crew ready to walk, and
they invited me to join them since I work there. So I ended up walking in the
parade too!
It was a fun
parade and took me back to my radio days, when I was in several parades. They
haven’t gotten any temp-cooler over the years!
As soon as that
ended, we hurried to the tent for the brat-eating contest. Our neighbors came
to watch Ryan and so did our friends Jonathan and Julie. I screamed as loud as
I could for Ryan – but I tried not to watch. Just kept punching pictures on my
phone.
He ended up
coming in second, eating 8 brats in 10 minutes. The winner ate 9, and no one
else was close to either of them.
He said it was
really hard to eat after having been out in the heat for three solid hours. He
was hot and a little sick to his stomach when he started, but he powered
through! And when he was done, he got ice cream. LOL! I got my favorite BBQ
from this area and then a root beer float. I haven’t had a root beer float in
FOREVER!!!! It was so good – especially because I was so hot. We walked back to
his work to get our car and then headed home to a very pretty sunset.
It was a fun
festival. Looking forward to making this one a tradition!
1 comment:
Sounds like such a fun time!
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