Lawer Irish Fest – Saturday

Today was filled with parades, food, and a lot of hanging out and visiting with friends.

It was so overcast this morning and with the crazy weather that we’ve been having, everyone was worried about having the parade getting rained out. But the weather couldn’t have been any better or more perfect! It was overcast and I’m not kidding, some people actually had jackets on. It was supposed to get to 90 degrees today, and it sure wasn’t feeling it this morning. But that’s OK right? No one wants to sit in the scorching hot weather to watch a parade. So like I said, it was perfect! The one thing also about the parade that made it pretty cool was that we know the couple that bought Daryl’s parents house and since we knew from previous parades that it’s a good spot to sit, they said that they would keep a spot for us for our lawn chairs for the parade at their house.

Watching the parade from where Daryl’s parents lived

Now I’m not normally a big parade person, but this is my second parade that I went to in the last 2 weeks. That has to be some kind of record for me or something. But the parade was just tons of fun. It’s always a good time when you know 99% (or higher) of all the people who were in the parade. The entries were anything from family businesses, to

Daryl’s brother and sister in law’s float

fire trucks, dancers, old tractors, to even the log cabin that drove by the other day. And just at the end of the parade, the sun came out and it really started to warm up. We went downtown after to watch my niece dance and also to  just hang out for the day. They really had a great crowd and the weather was holding out without any rain.

Street shot during the day

The one thing that I’ve never seen before was that when they were getting the kids games set up, they were working on the sand dig. Now this is where the kids dig in the sand for money. But this time what they did was to take a real cement truck and literally dump in the money. Then they used the truck to mix it up. That is just too funny! But the kids loved it and had a great time!

Dumping in the money

These kids knew just exactly what to do

William and a bunch of his friends were in charge of driving the golf carts around to bring people to their cars or to the other parts of the town. We even heard later that they were giving tours of the town, which was a really good idea. And as the music was playing in the big tent and everyone was just sitting around visiting, I just couldn’t help to think just how successful this whole project was for the town. The committee started to meet in the beginning of the year and met weekly. And you could really tell that they thought of just about everything!  Like most of the towns around our area, it at one time was a pretty big town with tons of stores and movie theaters. But as the years went by, the amount of businesses and residents changed. So it was really pretty cool to see it so alive this weekend. We were planning on heading home early in the afternoon, but you know how that goes, we ran into Daryl’s Aunt and Uncle who we haven’t seen for some time. We had a  cold drink and a really nice visit with them and then home we went to take another shower. We had tickets for the Lions Chicken Supper and we knew that it was going to be busy. They had enough chicken for 1200 meals, and that’s a lot of people all wanting to eat supper. When we got to town the supper line wasn’t too long and it didn’t take too long for them to plate up our food. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking this looked like a lot of food for one person and I think the cost was $7. As the night went on, we really had a good time talking with friends that we haven’t seen for some time, listening to the band, and just hanging out. The weather was really good for our town during the day, but within 4 miles going both north and south of our town, they got rain. One town that is around 50 miles from Lawler got 8 inches of rain! Wouldn’t that have been a mess.  They said that the storm split when it got close. Some of the local town people said that it was the ‘Luck of the Irish’ (they were Irish of course). The night ended with a best kilt and legs contest. There were over 10 entries and the contestants were really good sports. When we finally found ourselves heading home, we were tired. Now we really shouldn’t have been, but it was a big day for our town and it was also a really fun day!