As you may remember from last year, it's a three-day event. The first day includes two parades, including the infamous shirttail parade at 11 p.m.
But the weather didn't look very promising that night. It was warm and humid, with thunderstorms roaming around. A severe thunderstorm watch had been issued. One storm hit our town (rain, some thunder and lightning) about 15 minutes before we started the 20-mile drive to the event. Uh-ohh, I said to myself. Doesn't look good. I grabbed our raincoats and prepared for the worst--I had to get the pictures, no matter what the weather did.
But as we headed northeast, we drove out of the rain. Dark clouds hung in the western sky, but the tourney town itself was high and dry ...
Indeed, the skies started clearing (and the humidity went down) as the night went on. The parades had no trouble at all.
I'll skip the dress parade photos--firemen in dress uniform marching in step. I know my audience. Instead of firemen in dress uniforms, you want firemen in dresses, right?
So here you are ...
And a fun time was had by all!
This was the 113th U.P. Firefighters Tournament, and this piece of equipment is nearly that old--a steamer that was pulled by horses to the site of a fire ...
Friday was the race day--races started at 9 a.m. and went on until about 3 p.m. I got there about 8, when it was cloudy and damp, wearing a light jacket. The forecast called for the clouds to gradually break up. "Gradually" in this case turned out to be about 20 minutes. By 10 a.m., hardly a cloud could be seen. It was sunny with crisp, dry air--typical U.P. summer weather.
With the sun smiling down on me as I ran around getting my pictures, I knew I had to pause and go back to the car, where I keep my bottle of sunscreen. I sat down in a shady area and spread the stuff on my face, arms and neck. Now I was ready for whatever the sun wanted to do.
The tourney went from about 9 a.m. to a little after 3 p.m. Here are a few shots of the action ...
Here is a team getting dressed. They started from the bar in back; one hand on their drink, the other on the bar and both feet off the ground. Otherwise, they were disqualified ...
This team is getting its equipment ready for the next race. I dedicate this photo especially to LadyV. In fact, some of the next few photos get rather, um, symbolic if you think about it ...
In most races, the firemen had to put on their boots, helmets and heavy jacket, connect lengths of hose and shoot a traffic cone out of a circle using the stream of water from the hose they had just connected.
The hose relay ...
Firemen dashed down the street excitedly, rushing to finish their tasks ...
When they screwed up, there was no place to hide. Call this premature ejac-- ...
Most of the time, though, these guys showed they know how to handle their hard, twitching hoses ...
... and were right on target with a powerful stream ...
(Whew! Was that good for you, too?)
The last race is called the mystery race, because only the host department knows about it until it was time to run it. They sure came up with a dandy this year. No hose. Instead, they had pails ... and used boots connected with a board.
They had two boards, with three boots nailed to each board. Three firemen had to climb into those boots and try to walk in unison ...
And that was just the start of it.
They had to carry ice cream pails and walk towards a big red bucket of water...
They had to scoop up water from the big red bucket with the ice cream pails. All three guys had to do that. They also had to keep most of the water in the pail, which is hard when you're battling to keep your balance ...
After that, they had to "walk" a distance to another, smaller bucket that has a tube on the outside and two orange ping-pong balls inside. They had to empty the ice cream pails into the smaller bucket. As the level of water in the bucket rose, so did the water in the tube ... until one of the ping-pong balls fell to the pavement. That's when the watches stopped ...
These were some of the craziest sights I have ever seen at the tourney (outside of the shirttail parade, of course).
It was a good time, but as I was driving home, I felt my legs and ankles stinging a little. Probably because of the weather, I reasoned. Then I got home and saw what had happened.
I was wearing shorts and very short socks (the same ones I wore the night before when I thought I was going to get drenched). The rain didn't hit them, but the sun did. My knees, my calves and especially my ankles, just above those short socks ...
Lovely, isn't it? The other ankle looked just the same ...
Ah, sunburn. My father's side of the family is Italian, so you would think I inherited the darker skin pigments of Mediterranean countries. But my dad married someone of Danish lineage, and I got the Scandinavian skin genes. Hence, I have light skin, freckles, and, given the right conditions, I burn.
So for the next few days I was using Tylenols and aloe vera skin lotions to put out the fire on my ankles. It's not hurting any longer and the bright red color is starting to fade, but ...
****
We were in the heat for the last two days. Highs here were about 92F (about 34C), but the humidity never got very bad. A mini-front moved through Wednesday night, and we're back in the 80s on Thursday.
We worked at the house on Tuesday. Due to the heat, we followed a very unambitious plan: Mostly sorting and organizing things. We did take another carload of things over to St. Vinny's (mostly books, LP records and some knit things my wife has been looking through) and then we later took some stuff home with us. We also visited my mom and took her out to dinner. In fact, we did a little shopping with her, as well--she bought two blouses and two pairs of pants.
We'll be back there on Friday. That may be when we go down to the basement again.
****
Plans for our mini-vacation next week are advancing. S wrote me a few days ago, voicing concerns that my wife might be angry or resentful about she and I being together. "My life has been stressful enough lately," she wrote. "If she is uncomfortable about us spending time one-on-one we should just stay together in a group." (I had told her earlier I wanted some one-on-one time with her. Just to talk.)
If you had ever met my wife, you would know she's not that kind of person--but, of course, S has not.
My wife and I talked about it over lunch Tuesday, and we agreed on how to handle it. Wednesday, just after lunch, I called S, talked to her for about a minute and then turned the phone over to my wife. They had a very pleasant chat for about five minutes.
Now S has one less thing to worry about.
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