St. Patrick's Day Parade

This is a little delayed, but in the category of "Better Late Than Never", here is my recap of the St. Patrick's Day Parade held in Uptown.  It's remarkable to me that the only college to be represented in the parade was good old St. Bonaventure, even though our school is a good 10-12 hours away.  It was an early start to the day at Town Tavern, where a good amount of St. Bonaventure graduates met up for some fellowship and laughs.  By this blogger's estimate, there were about 45-60 alumni packing into this bar. 
There was a lot of laughing and reminiscing about the good times at school and updates about our current situations.  There were 3 people at Town Tavern who actually lived on my floor during Freshman year at Bonas.  Small world!  We spent the wee hours of the morning catching up before heading into the position for the parade.  Armed with our St. Patrick's Day T-Shirts and Bojangles cups, we all marched to the float that you can see above and below.  You probably could have fit about 20-30 people on the float but, for some reason, the person driving the float only wanted about 8 people on the float.  Truth be told, our float wasn't exactly designed by the Acme Float Company.  With every step you took on the float it rocked one way or the other.  We probably could have done a great Hawaii 5-0 skit by using the float as a surf board that was going over some waves.  A great idea, that obviously went unconsidered is that if you don't want the float to hold more than 8 people, than build things onto the float that prevent people from standing on there.  As it was our float was just a series of platforms just inviting people to ride on the float.  I'm pretty sure Miss America never had to endure this.  In any event, we went through the parade with about 15-20 people on the float, and most of us were bouncing up and down to the music. 

You can get a better view of the float from the picture above.  As you can see, there is a significant amount of real estate for people to go on the parade route from the float. 

I've been to several parades as a child and it never occurred to me that the people in the parade could be "Average Joe's" like my classmates and I.  It was truly amazing how many people came out just to see the floats go by.  There were several people who recognized our school and "Cat-Called" to us from the crowd.  It was so exciting to hear so many people cheering for our university.
The actual parade route was probably about 30-45 minutes, but we had such a great time!  There were easily thousands of people in attendance.  At any particular junction, you could see that the crowd was about 10 people deep and it seemed to go on forever.

This is my view from the float.  You can see the impressive crowd along one side of the float.  This was easily rivaled on the opposite side of the street.  Again, you can see how amazed these kids are by our float.  You would have thought Chris Rock was on the float or something.  I seriously spent at least half of the parade thinking to myself, "I wonder what these kids are finding so enthralling about our float.  Did someone fall off the float or something?"  The good news is that no one fell off, it's just us and our green shirted unity that the masses had their attention sucked into.  My friend, Joe, is seen walking along the float in an effort to calm the float driver's nerves after asking, several times, for people to get off of the float.  For some reason, I don't recall hearing the driver asking.  Perhaps it was the girl next to me who was yelling and bouncing up and down like she was on a trampoline.  Let's just say that stability was not a big selling point of this particular float.  A large gust of wind...who am I kidding....any wind at all would have been problematic for this float as it was teetering and tottering as it was under perfectly ideal conditions.  I'm pretty sure it's parade float days are in the rear view.

Once the parade route was over, we all went our separate ways.  There was a cool Irish festival that was located at the end of the parade route and there were so many things to see.  There were Irish knick-knacks to buy.  Against my better judgment, I bought one.  There was food and drinks that could have satisfied even the pickiest individual, and to top it all off, there were singers and dancers.  It was a lot of fun!  I can't wait until next year so that I can relive the entire experience!