Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Summer Crazies, Part I

The 61st Annual FIBArk (First in Boating on the Arkansas) Festival was this past weekend... an annual event which finds Our Fair City doubling in size for a few crazy days. Sometimes TOO crazy. (A lot of our friends actually leave town during FIBArk... it's not a bad plan.)

It's still new to the DM (his second FIBArk), so we stuck around and went to some of the events. It's really quite nice to live a scant 4 blocks from the Festival, since we could walk down whenever we needed to get out of the house, cruise the scene for a bit, and then wander back home.

So... a few of our personal highlights:

Tenderfoot Hill Climb. Don't even THINK that we DO this race. We just like to watch our crazy FRIENDS do it. You see those dots? Runners. From 1st and F streets, three blocks, cross the river, run to the top of S Mountain, and run back to the starting line. The first place runner usually does the entire thing in under twelve minutes. I kid you not.


The Parade. It's a small town. The parade route is... hm... six blocks long? But every Shriner outfit known to mankind shows up for this thing, along with the usual contingent of outrageous floats and obligatory cute kids twirling batons.

Our friends Jack and Linda providing tandem parade music.


The Salida ballon ride folks firing off their balloon jet. (I couldn't help but wonder what it cost them to do this for several blocks.)


Local band, the Groove Farmers. The DM's partner in "Your Surrogate Cousin" is sitting in on harmonica for this one. (That's Eric on the far right, red hat.)



It was also the opening weekend for the Salida Farmer's Market. Hooray! We picked up a few goodies to tide us over until our share from Weathervane Farm starts next week. Yummy!


The unfortunate end of all this frivolity was an apparently professional hit on three local restaurants in the wee hours of Monday morning.... really quite appalling. The biggest weekend of the summer for many of our small, family-run businesses, all lost. Kinda makes you want to smack someone, doesn't it?

Coming up next? Salida Art Walk in just three more days! Yikes! Are we ready? Of course not.

2 comments:

  1. o.0 that looks like a really tough climb!

    I think that the hits happening would make people want to do more then hit someone. that is a horrible thing to happen :/

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have to agree with Jennifer - smacking is not nearly enough!

    Tenderfoot or "S" mountain - we never did that race-climb either but we always enjoyed watching those who could do it.

    Lindy

    ReplyDelete

Linocut in Progress: The Third Act

Time to wrap up this linocut ! And we are wrapping at warp speed (see what I did there?)... because there are deadlines. Exhibition deadline...