So you want to see more of this year's St. Patrick's Day Parade here in Fort Lauderdale, do you? Well, then, here you are:
The Wearin' O' the Green
You'd expect, around St. Patrick's Day and certainly at the parade, for both parade participants and
onlookers
to be wearing green; that's the tradition, after all. But watching the parade, it seemed to me as if some of the units had no identifying purpose- commercial or civic- for being in the parade. Except that they were wearing green:
Traditional "Floats"
The Fort Lauderdale St. Patrick's Day Parade is neither large nor elaborate; not like Chicago or New York. So as you have seen, the entries tend to be simple. They might already be working out in California on floats for the Rose Bowl Parade next year in Pasadena, but for this parade, I suspect that such floats as there were probably took a week or less to put together. Many were just overly-decorated truck beds:
Here are a couple of movies of floats going by; just use the players to watch them:
(Mouseover Image Above for Player Controls)
(Mouseover Image Above for Player Controls)
I don't think there were any actual motorized floats like you see in big-city parades; all of the floats were either being towed by a vehicle or were, as I said, truck beds. The "float" at left was interesting because there is a lock shop right up the street in Dallas called "Bee's Keys", but this is a t-shirt shop called "Bee's Tees". Looks like the whole family was roped in.
Here are more photos of the floats in today's parade:
(Click Thumbnails to View)
There were a couple of floats carrying musical groups. The first was sponsored by a group called "Friends of Hugh Taylor Birch State Park". That park, where Fred and I have gone on our bikes numerous times, is about a mile north and two miles east of the condo- right up A1A north of Sunrise Blvd. As you can see,
the banjo group
is probably much more comfortable riding on the float than they might have been walking on their own. Here are movies of this group and of the one sponsored by the Briny Pub, a River Walk restaurant that Fred and I visit frequently:
(Mouseover Image Above for Player Controls)
(Mouseover Image Above for Player Controls)
There were more floats from all kinds of organizations, and there are pictures below for some of them:
Down With the Gas Guzzlers!
There was a subset of the parade entries that eschewed the use of big trucks to provide motive power, and I took some pictures of these entries.
Here are pictures of the actual motive power:
(Click on Thumbnails Above to View)
Other Parade Units
We've already seen pictures of the major groupings of parade units- marching bands, floats, old and odd vehicles, and so on. I might point out that this parade was pretty remarkable in that I did not see one entry featuring a politician! Here are pictures of some of the other units that didn't fall into a major category.
I would have thought that there would have been a lot of Irish Dancing, but I only saw one group of four girls skipping along to music provided by someone's dad out front towing a boombox. Fred was the one who took the movie this time, as they skipped/danced by him a bit east of me:
(Mouseover Image Above for Player Controls)
Probably the most thinly-veiled entry in the parade were the group of go-kart drivers who did some driving stunts right in front of me at the widened intersection.
The kart riders certainly didn't seem to belong in a St. Patrick's Day parade, although they did take the time to attach something green to the front of each of the karts. In any event, I got to see them do their driving stunts, since the only place they could do them were at the intersections. You can use the player below to watch them:
(Mouseover Image Above for Player Controls)
Of course there were the civic and school groups that just love to march in parades like this, although I'll admit that some of them had only the most tenuous connection to today's parade theme.
The parade actually ended when a contingent of
Fort Lauderdale Mounted Police
came by, followed by what seemed to be ragtag group of people, some wearing green and some not. Who they were I never really found out, as the crowd began to disperse after they came by.
What Were They Thinking?
After categorizing all my pictures and showing them to you above, I ended up with a quartet of pictures that didn't belong anywhere, and I realized that they didn't belong anywhere because they really didn't belong in the parade at all, and I have put them here, in the category of "What were these people thinking when they decided to put together a unit, go through the application process and take the time to come to downtown Fort Lauderdale to march six blocks?" Maybe you can figure it out:
"Well, they might not be around next year."
"They have a parade on the Death Star, too."
"Tell me again: what does the dog do?"
"Well, I had these two camels, see, and I thought..."
You can use the links below to return to the first part of the parade or return to the page for our Florida trip.
