Fridley Parade

You don't want to know how many hundreds of photos Bill and I took between us of this parade to celebrate the existence of Fridley, MN.

Bill absolutely adores parades. He thinks of them as being practically the life and soul of small town America though he does recognise that sometimes big cities have them as well. I'm not sure where we fit Fridley in, as I would call it a suburb of Minneapolis.

I think it's the way that small towns drag out every scrap of personality to display that really gets him.

I was amazed at the advertising opportunities, though I have deliberately not shown you the

The Police cars
The Boy Scouts
The 4-H banner
The Girl Scouts banner
The Shriners with their little cars and funny hats
The red and yellow fire trucks
VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars)
The Grand Marshal
The Mayor
The County Commissioner
The Historical Society (at least they had a brass band)
Candidates for State Representative
The 2011 Aquatennial Captain and Princess
An adverts for Dairy Queen, an insurance agent, Pet Taxi,
The Coon Rapids beauty queen, the K-9 police unit,
Fridley Community Theatre showing Anything Goes
The Lions Club
The Zurah Legion of Honor
Miss Robbinsdale
Beauty Queens from East Bethel
Maple River Marching Band, Fairmont High School Band, Fridley Dance Team,
or a bunch of really fat old men on fat motorcycles who enjoyed roaring back and forth and really held up the show. I'm jaded, I'll admit.


Art came down on his riding mower to avoid walking very far. Apparently this is the second year he's done this and he got all the usual comments asking if he was going to cut their grass.



I must admit that running slightly late Bill, Norma and I piled into the car to drive part of the way before walking down to find a spot.

It began with a 5k race. Bill was sad not to have known else he would have joined in. I suspect he would have done well...it's called 'pothunting'.




Their son Spike had been invovled in some way with one of the bands' costumes or flag routine



or something but beyond that I'm pretty certain Art and Norma



sat through practically the entire parade for Bill's benefit.




We were well impressed with the Twin Cities Unicycle Club.


That's not a skill that's very common any more.



I doubt it ever was.

I have to admit to being the first to say 'uncle'.



I was getting cold and I'd decided Fridley had more politicians and business people



than I wanted to know about. Also all the neighbouring areas seemed to have sent their bands, so I just didn't see an end to it. Still, after all this, we practically had to drag Bill back to the car. Isn't he cute?