still a little out of place
I’ve lived in Portland for almost five years now. I’ve yet to get to one of the Rose Festival parades. Maybe if I actually attended one, I might be a little more excited about it. Still, most of the time when the Rose Fest rolls around I find myself feeling like a tourist, who’s stumbled across some local festival in the place where he’s visiting that he didn’t expect. “What the fuck is all this?” I think as I push my way through unexpected crowds. “And where did all these goddamn people come from?”
Last year, the start of my vacation happened to coincide with the Rose Parade. I worked a partial shift at my job on the first day of my vacation (yep, I’m a sucker), and Ashley came to pick me up so we could get our rental car and get on the road. What should have been a 12-minute round trip ended up taking over half an hour as we were routed around closed streets and waved into a detour queue of other cars. After I’d finally gotten home, and packed, and walked down to Budget to pick up my rental car (an hour behind schedule) I remember the clerk asking me if I’d had a chance to see the parade at all. While I was polite about it, I’m pretty sure I told her I couldn’t stand parades. That’s not entirely true, but still, I was pretty irritated at the time.
Maybe I’ll go next year, maybe that will give me another point of view on the whole thing. Although I will always regard the practice of setting up a tent along the parade route the night before as being vaguely idiotic.
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