Dairy Days in Fredericksburg, Iowa was this week and this year it took on a whole new meaning for me. Now if you’re not familiar with this celebration, it’s been going on for the past 89 years and the town takes it very seriously. But if you’re a kid, it’s a couple days of carnival rides, cotton candy, and parades. Growing up, we weren’t from this town and we really never went to the Dairy Days, but when I was in high school .. this was the place to go. In those days without ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’, the next best thing was to go to the local towns and just check out what was going on. It was always tons of fun and you always ended up meeting some one new. And then, after my girlfriends and I all got married, we stopped going. But this year because I’m working in this town, it has taken on a whole new meaning. The company that I work for wanted to enter a float into the parade and we also wanted to win the best float. Now I’ve never helped with a float before and it’s really kind of a lot of work. But after a couple of weeks of planning and revising our float, we were ready for the parade. There is always two parades on Wednesday, one in the morning and one in the evening – so the day finally came that we pulled the float out of the warehouse. She looked Great! Now I don’t want to sound biased or anything, but I couldn’t believe anyone could possibly beat our float! I didn’t do that much to help build it, but I felt like a proud parent as it seemed to shine out in the parking lot as it was heading to our spot in the line up. As the parade was getting organized, I took some time to walk up to watch it. As I’m walking, I thought how funny it is to be in such a small town that you literally know almost everyone. The first parade entry that I went by was a convertible with the Dairy Princess in it. They caught my eye when they waved Hi to me. Both the driver and the Dairy Princess are friends of ours. I didn’t get too much further and then I saw a local band that was in the parade that I also knew. Well, you get the picture. I think I knew most everyone in the parade and also who was watching the parade. Just too funny! Then it came to the judging of the floats. And guess what? We got second 🙁 Now I knew that I was a little competitive, but this confirmed that I must be REALLY competitive. Oh well, we’re already working on ideas for next year and it’s going to be Fantastic! You might just want to come to the parade next year to see our float! As for the night parade, we couldn’t get by without having more rain and storms. With tornadoes sighted in the area and 1 1/2 inches of rain that fell in less than 7 minutes – you guessed it, the night parade was cancelled. I was disappointed because I was going to walk the parade by our float and throw out candy. But I also wasn’t really that excited about walking in a down pour of rain either.
There is a lot of candy thrown out in the local parades. These two boys are ready for it.
