Memorial Day Parade

The Boalsburg Memorial Day Parade (which actual takes place 2 day before Memorial Day) was last night, and as per our annual tradition, we were in attendance.  You must understand that our town is only 6.5 square miles in size and has a population of less than 4,000 people, so you can't really go with high expectations for the parade.  In fact we can't even afford full size horses for our parade:

Actually, the selling point for the parade and the reason why so many people attend is because ~90% of the parade entrants throw candy.  In terms of amount of candy received, this 30 minute parade ranks somewhere just below Halloween, but above Easter, and he doesn't have to move more than ~5 feet because people literally throw candy directly at him.  All he has to do is wait, bucket in hand:

Since it is a small parade, there isn't really much in the way of floats.....actually there are no floats at all. More like lots of fire trucks....

...and MORE fire trucks....

Other than the token politicians riding in the back of various models of sports care, the only other main contributor to the parade (other than the fire departments of the 25 nearest towns) are the local girls twirling classes, of which I didn't take any pictures, but there were at least 5 different twirler groups in the parade (3 of which were playing the same song while twirling.  Can't we at least have some originality?).  One of our friends made the comment after the parade, that "if an alien race were to come to earth and observe only this parade, the only logical conclusion that they would be able to come to is that small twirling girls must be the number one cause of fires on Earth".  I just hope that there isn't a fire anywhere in the surrounding 25 miles because for those 30 minutes on a Saturday evening in May, every available truck is cruising our little Main St. throwing handfuls of candy to waiting kids and would be hard pressed to get anywhere in a hurry.