Mood:
lazyTopic: family
Saturday was the annual Western Day event held in my town - or more specifically - the "old" part of town. This event has been around for a long time. When the kids were younger, we'd watch the parade & go over to the blocked off part of Main Street and wander through the shops, look at the vendor booths, maybe grab a corny dog or funnel cake, stop in the petting zoo, and then go home. Now it has become a full-fledged money making event for the city. When Main Street was being re-done several years ago to re-energize Old Town (as we call it), Western Day (used to be a whole weekend & called Western Days) was cancelled.
Back when my oldest girls were in middle school, we even went one year when one of them was on crutches. She'll never let me live that down!
Starting with this year (they're calling it the 3rd annual western day), they started charging admission unless you were a resident of the city. I wondered how they would control how and where people got in. I guess they ordered all the chain link fencing in Texas a lot of fencing and erected it all around Old Town. What a sight to see!
Gone are the dachshund races - which was one of my favorite parts of the event. Gone is the free stuff - bounce houses, petting zoo, kids' mini-train ride. In its place are ticket booths. Four tickets can allow a child to get in a bounce house for a little bit - and each ticket was $1 (OMG!). And it was so hot on Saturday!
I got us water & lemonade to the turn of over $10! That was for 3 of us.
Later in the day the parade came down Main Street. And to lead it off - 34 head of Longhorn cattle! Now that was impressive. I had never been that close to a Longhorn. Before the parade I snapeed some pictures of them while they were in their pen waiting to stampede walk slowly behind a police cruiser and a horseman to start the ball rolling. This was one of the largest parades in our town I've seen. Lasted almost an hour and had all sorts of organizations - Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, church groups, dance studios, firefighters drum corps, firefighters bag pipes, the high school marching band with the dancers and flag corps - you name it - they marched! By the time the parade was over, we were pretty hot and tired so we came home.
There had been a World Championship Tamale eating contest. The winner was from Minnesota & shared in a prize of almost $4000.
Now we get to do this all over again to celebrate the Christmas season when our "Old Town" decorates City Hall and the surrounding areas and launches "Holiday at the Hall" (formerly known as Old Town Stroll). Wonder how much they are going to try to soak us charge for this event?
