ESCAPISM

OK, I admit that even living in the End of the Rainbow Valley cannot seclude us from all the chaos going on in our world right now. Even if we stayed home and didn't turn on the radio, computer/tv, it would still creep into our conversation. I live with an activist.

While parts of our country/ the world were digging out after Matthew/ communities were dealing with more daily shootings/ civil wars, what did we do? We spent the weekend celebrating Fall and the Harvest. 'Sounds trite but important to celebrate each day since we don't know what tomorrow will bring.

Saturday afternoon we jumped in the Miata to attend Viroqua's 7th Annual Harvest Parade. Thank you Viroqua for being different and having a parade without motorized vehicles and candy throwing nor politics. Your creativity and whimsical entries were refreshing. Throwing flower heads versus candy ingenious and better for our health and the Earth. And we didn't miss the candidates one bit!




Viroqua as I have written about before is a very artsy community with reknowned Waldorf School and Pleasant Ridge High School obviously reflect in their Harvest parade with hand made costumes, a lot of tempera paint and paper mache bigger than life sized puppets interspersed with stilt walking nature characters. Of course there was wildlife, birds like crows,  and fox (What does the Fox say?)               
                                        

Fish and  roller skating bees...

Forest fairies of all sizes

 And of course musical accompaniment

Drums,

violins,      




AND

horns... 

Flower children and grape people and strollers, kids of all ages and a lot of dogs in attendance with their owners too.

The parade ended at their Ekhart park where there were food trucks and live music with Kids Music with Ryan, Irish Jam, Noble Surfers, Lotus Head, Math Rock, culminating with the  Driftless Fire Tribe, a fire dancing performance at dusk. 

A big thanks to the day's sponsors who make this Coulee town a better place to live and for a really great 
community of caring folk just what we needed to escape the world's chaos for a bit...

Then, unexpectedly en route home we came upon a tractor parade with about 2 dozen tractors.  Looks like they were headed to an apple orchard from their last turn. A one parade day is good but two, even better...