Saturday February 18, 2012-Caddo Lake NWR

We were up bright and early this morning to go Jefferson, a small town about 12 miles away, for their Mardi Gras parade. It had rained all night and continued to rain this morning, at times pretty heavy. Since we had taken the float over already and stored it in a large warehouse, all we had to do this morning was take one of the UTV's over behind Todd's truck, so off we went about 9 o'clock.

This is the rear of the float, showing the refuge sign on the back. And no silly, that's not real brick!

This is the float that we helped to put together. The replica guillotine was built by Todd and Josh, the resident firefighter. The tower in the front of the float is supposed to be a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Someone wrapped it in a gauzy material because she said it looked like an oil derrick. On second thought, it did kind of look like a derrick, but now it's wrapped in gauze.

Here is Stella standing in front of the float. It was still cold and rainy outside, so we stayed inside as much as we could. Stella hated it because there was no running water in the old warehouse, so the restrooms didn't work. As some of you know, she has LBB (Little Bitty Bladder), but she solved the problem by going down the street to a business to use the facilities.

Here is the whole crew getting ready to pull the float out into the rain. Luckily for us, the warehouse had a forklift operator to move it into the proper places.

This is one of the other floats all decked out in the Mardi Gras colors. There must have been close to 40 floats, our number was #31, so it was a big deal for this area.

This was one of the best floats in the parade. I noticed that the float judges just drove right by our float, so I assume we didn't win. We never heard who won, but it's a political thing, decided by the locals.

It rained throughout most of the parade but we hadn't been stopped for fifteen minutes after the parade was over when the sun started coming out. Figures...

We returned to the park and put all the equipment away and came on home, cold and exhausted. We had a nice time but since we're not sure when we'll come back here, unlike Todd and Sue and of course the regular employees. They'll have fun next year too.

So long.