Rush City Music Festival

For the past several summers, Rush City has hosted a music festival, and it is never very good, but we are a small town so we do our best. Yesterday was the second annual 5-mile run/walk (I missed the race last year because I was sick with swine flu). The walkers started at 8:00, even though the "website" (yes, those quotation marks are intentional) said 8:30, so there were some walkers who started with the eight of us who ran (and why would they start the walkers first anyway? My head is full of questions about the whole thing). This is how the race started: a woman stood at the "starting line" and said, "ok, ready....go!" and started the stopwatch on her phone. We had to run a 2.5 mile loop twice, which included juking and jiving through the seating area they were setting up in front of the stage, and running through standing puddles in the fairgrounds. When we finished, we were rewarded with a bottle of warm water! It was quite sad.

On the bright side, my running buddy Penelope was there to watch me run. I didn't run with her in the race because, you know, it's hard to run with a dog in a crowd of people... but really I wasn't sure how she'd do in a distance race, because she's more used to the slow plodding training runs we do.

The day did get better. We went back for lunch at the Music Fest and it was very tasty! Also, we spotted Fred's car in the car show. I wonder if Fred ever imagined his grandkids posing in front of this car when he bought it in 1968. That would probably have blown his mind.

Pam and Fred had Aly and Emily for the weekend, so the day got even better when Laura and Karl joined them! Here they are at a playground:

The weekend was chock-full of fun in Rush City, because today was the Big Splash at the Pool, and the cousins got to hang out together again. I will say that I love our pool and will do anything to help it out, so I'm glad we had a sunny hot day and a great turnout for the event. Karl, Laura, Aly, and Emily (yes, the goofy-faced children in this picture are mine).