Post Parade

Last weekend I did my slowest ride ever. Good thing too because I was pulling two princesses on our custom made float.

Long story short: Abby got aced out of being in the River Days Parade with her dance troupe (the troupe decided to skip the parade this year) so when I got an invitation from the neighborhood program I jumped at the chance…on one condition. I had to ride my bike in it.
This allowed me to pull the girls in the bike trailer (Ang’s condition was that Emma be strapped in so she wouldn’t just stand up and walk off the back of the thing). This meant we had to get creative with the trailer, running it in “flat” mode and with some tulle and Ang’s deft hand it became a pretty decent little float at about 23:00 the night before. For that matter Ang did most of the hard work as I had to be on site 2 hours before the parade started to get queued up with the group. She got the mermaids dressed in their (current) favorite princess outfits and they sat atop the float waving their hearts out.

In a couple of these shots you can see Abby’s hand near her face. She was plugging her ears because the SeaFair Pirate Cannon was only 10 floats back. The report from that thing is, let’s just say, convincing.

I thought it was funny to watch the crowd react to the thundering cannon everytime it went off. You could almost see the speed of sound in the wave of reactions of the onlookers down the parade route.