hometown parade

On Saturday we went to a parade in downtown Kennewick. It was cool. I was surprised how long the parade lasted.  It was almost two hours, which is longer than the July 4th parade at Grandma Margie's house. At the beginning of the parade, there were tons of horses.  There was the Sheriff's search and rescue band, many different local rodeo princesses from the surrounding counties, some from the local Native American tribes.  But by far the most interesting group of horses was a musical band.  In the picture below I got the big drum player.  I was most impressed with the horn section, several trumpets riding on horses.  They had their music clipped to the end of their trumpets.

In addition to the horses, there were lot of cars.  There were classic cars, like the group of Ford Mustangs, or the Cougar and Thunderbird cliques. There were some old Model A cars and Dick Tracy style pre-War beauties. My favorite car was a baby blue slug-bug convertible. I had never seen a baby blue car before, and I had always been on the lookout for a rare color slug bug convertible. We also saw the most rare license plate ever.  It was from Aruba.
As with all parades, the floats and walkers threw a whole lot of candy. We only heard about the parade about an hour before it started, so we were not really prepared with candy bags, but we were able to store the candy in our pockets and in the bottom of the stroller. It was mostly tootsie rolls and jolly ranchers. Other types of candy they threw included now and laters, hard candy, fruties, lemon heads, sweedish fish and other stuff. As you can see from this picture, the bottom of the stroller was pretty full of candy.

Some people did not give out candy.  The Little Caesar's van handed out coupons.  A local kids dentist handed out tooth brushes and plastic leis.

We were really fortunate that Levi was a super baby the whole time.  He was happy in his stroller and very quiet.

[Post co-written by Sam & Harrison]