Kla Ha Ya Days 7-19-14

Today's adventure was a local embracing of my new home.  Snohomish's Kla Ha Ya Days (Kla Ha Ya meaning 'welcome') was this week and I just scratched the surface of this fun celebration.
I got downtown a couple hours before the parade and enjoyed wandering around the eerily empty streets playing with my camera.  I had a delicious raspberry white mocha from Rock City Café.  I was told they have the best coffee in the state and I certainly believed it after having mine! 

By the time the parade started, the streets had been thickly lined with a multitude of people.  Little kids eager for candy, local shop owners washing their windows, people with dogs, tall people, short people, old people, people with pink hair... but mostly happy people (the little boy in the monkey backpack near me alternated between candy ecstasy and screaming overload).  I LOVED the beautiful horses, but if I was handing out awards, the grand prize would have gone to the Sauerkraut band/group.  These people were having such a great time out there, you just couldn't watch them without grinning.


This Viking was advertising a pumpkin toss/medieval faire and would stop and blow his horn and then shout "BECAUSE I CAN!!"



"Boba Fett!?"



These horses were made of poetry.



Hello handsome!



This dog was super happy to be in the parade!



The Sauerkrauts.  Great band, great costumes, and great smiles!



Haha.. vote for Pedro.

This was just the parade.  There was also a River Run before the parade, I think people could run 1 or 5 miles.  I enjoyed vendor/craft booths filling a couple streets, a chainsaw artist, and a man balancing a unicycle on his face.  This is just what I saw.  There was so much more to do, including a bed race, salmon BBQ, Frogtastic Kids Fair, etc. 
On my way back to the car, I stopped in to the Cabbage Patch restaurant for a bite.  I have never had anything there that was not superb, including the service, and enjoyed a fresh scone while I waited for my smoked salmon scramble.
Snohomish is just a fun, friendly and picturesque town, and full of great antique stores as well.

Fishing the Snohomish 8-15-12

I took about a week off from work and Dave and I were supposed to take Cedar and also my ex-dog Skye across the state to visit my dad.  Unfortunately he was still sick and I was 3 kinds of sick so I had to do little relaxing things around this area instead of bringing a ton of germs to my dad.  We still managed to find fun things to do.  One of these things was to launch his boat into the Snohomish River and fish.  He packed us a picnic, and while we didn't catch anything, it was really fun.  What a huge and beautiful river.

While on the river we caught no fish, but some leaves and weeds, and I even caught a large and heavy piece of bark that was quite exciting until I realized it was not a large and heavy fish.  We also enjoyed seeing parachuters and hot air balloners.

There was a cool dilapidated old railroad bridge that kids apparently used to party on.  Now they seem to congregate near it, as when we returned to the boat launch we could hear them loudly having less than intelligent conversation. 

Sunset was pretty from the river.  I liked this old farm house.  Which reminds me!  I wish I had taken a picture or a movie, but at one point there was a family with a pug who were playing on a beach of the river.  A hereford cow with a very small calf came out of the brush near them and the pug went after them!  The cow was understandably threatened by this odd midget wolf-descendant and charged it a bit, stomping around and tossing her head, and the woman ran at the animals yelling for "Pugsley."  I was a bit worried that the cow might charge this bigger target, but luckily instead Pugsley gave up on its large beef dinner and came back to her and the herefords moved on up the river.  It was exciting, but I was glad I didn't need to go use my First Responder training. 

Also a train happened to go over one of the working railway bridges while we were on the river.  It was actually pretty cool to see from this angle.