July 4th Festivities

To celebrate the 4th of July, we headed east a couple of miles to Slater where there is an annual 4th of July celebration that includes the surrounding towns. There was a parade that began at 10 on Saturday.

     My friend works for the newspaper and had an assignment to photograph all of the festivities. I told her I would help her by taking pictures of the parade because her feet were very sore. I was sitting in the sun on the curb most of the time and me in my infinite wisdom forgot to wear sunscreen. Even though I was only in the sun for an hour, I got a sunburn on my shoulders. It isn't too bad though, thankfully.

    Anyway, I got some pretty good photos. These are some of my favorites:

A neat looking old car. Anyone know the make/model?

A great looking truck. It actually ended up stalling out in front of us. A bunch of guys came out of the crowd and pushed it down the street. It would have been a really great picture!

I liked how patriotic this looks!

If you look closely, those are geese that are dressed up and walking down the street. Only in Iowa. Actually this is a local guy who has trained his geese and is in high demand all throughout the U.S. Hmmmmm.

 There were tons of tractors in this parade. I think there were just about every kind you could want.

 There was a whole group of these guys.

This is possibly my favorite of all the pictures I took. The little girl is so cute!

After the parade we stuck around and watched a performance by the 34th Army band.

According to www.iowanationalguard.com,

The mission of the 34^th Army Band is to provide music that promotes troop morale, unit esprit, and civil/military community relations.  The alternate mission is to augment local security forces and process prisoners of war when combat intensity reaches the point that the use of the band in it's music mission is impractical. 

They were definitely a spectacular band!

    To finish off a fun day, there was a get together with families from our church out on a farm. They have a great view of the fireworks and there was homemade ice cream that was delicious!

    Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy all day, so it's a good thing most of the festivities took place today! I hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend!