Everyone Loves a Parade

Every spring our county hosts the "Daffodil Parade". It is one of the biggest parades in our region. The parade is so in demand that it actually occurs in 4 different cities on the same day (Tacoma, Puyallup, Sumner, & our home town of Orting). We almost always go to our town's main street and watch the parade. We see school marching bands, cheer leaders, fire trucks, princesses, old cars and farm equipment, politicians, horses, grown men dressed as pirates (they are very popular), and lots of floats covered with daffodils. Even though it is not raining, this year we will not be watching the parade.......that is because all of us will be "IN" the parade. My wife and youngest son will join my daughter on the "Miss Pierce County's Outstanding Teen" team, and then my oldest son and I will be marching with his drama/theater group.

So how about you, do you love a parade? Does your town/community have a regular parade every year?

(Here is a picture of the "Seafair Pirates" that terrorize the Daffodil parade every year)

Cool to have a parade there where you live.
We seldom have parades.
The only parade I've ever seen was in Disney Land, a Alladin parade.

Everyone needs an excuse to dress like pirates!

Parades always look like fun to be in. But now that I have actually been in one, I must say that it is more fun to watch them. When you are in the parade you spend a lot of time just waiting for it to be your turn to go.

So what sort of event/occasion is the "Daffodil Parade" for /about?


We have parades here every year but I haven't been to any in years. Those are the Mardi Gras parades. We even have Christmas parades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardi_Gras

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardi_Gras_in_Mobile

The Daffodil parade is the grand event in the Puyallup River Valley Daffodil Festival. The Puyallup River Valley used to grow tons of hops, for some reason the demand for hops dropped drastically in the 1920's (prohibition?). So the region started growing daffodils instead.

My guess is that they grew too many daffodils to be able to sell all of them successfully and started the festival (and later the parade) to find a way to draw attention to the industry and use up millions of excess daffodils.

We have a town parade in August on a Bank Holiday Monday. In the 90's they used to be quite big, then the number of 'floats' dipped and for a while in the early 2000's it was a very small parade. Now things have picked up again and the parades are pretty good.

It's all good fun.

Fundy

You Brits and your crazy "bank holidays". (just kidding don't send me a smoked kipper in the mail).

Parades are good (at least once or twice a year). If I see them more often than that they kind of just run together.

Staybrite wrote:

Parades are good (at least once or twice a year). If I see them more often than that they kind of just run together.

Try to imagine them every day of the week,twice on Saturday,for about a month and then finally about 3 or 4 parades on the last two days each ,Monday and Tuesday. That is Mardi Gras.

And Disneyworld!

alldatndensum wrote:

And Disneyworld!

Really??? Didn't know that,the only parades I am familiar with at Disney are the ones I've seen on TV. The last time I was there ,there weren't any.

That's true Disney holds a parade several times a week doesn't it?

Oh well,the last time I was at Disney was back around '90. Either they started doing parades since then or I just missed them while I was there.

They do daily parades at The Magic Kingdom and Disney/MGM at Disneyworld. I don't remember if they do it at Epcot or the Animal Kingdom, though.

We went to The Magic Kingdom one day and Epcot the next and then had to come back. We never made it to Disney/MGM.