Wednesday, December 15, 2010.
The picture is of Green Bay from a cliff walk. We live very near the big lake now and can drive to it in 10 minutes. This walk we took was on The Clearing's property. The Clearing is a place for the "clearing of men's minds". They give culture, nature and relaxing activities to the people who need to get away from their busy lives. John and I will be taking several classes there. One in particular is where both of us will be painting landscapes with oils. That should be fun.
As I promised, while we are away from the resort I will tell old stories. I know I haven't posted anything in 13 days, but here goes.
Our 1st 4th of July Parade
For years our customers would drive downtown to the 4th of July Parade. They would come back to the resort and tell us how it went. John and I never bothered to go. One year I went with some customers/friends and I was surprised. The parade only went 2 blocks, turned off a side street and was finished. It was only 2 blocks!
Now I thought that even we could make a float for such a short parade. Since I felt that the parade was so low key, there wasn't much of a high standard of quality of float. Some were just a car with crepe paper draped over it, and others were just an antique car with people waving. Now that we could handle. So I went back to the resort with a plan to enter the resort's vehicle/trailer/kayaks in the next year's parade.
My plan was to decorate our resort vehicle, which is a 1983 Toyota Land Cruiser. John and I would attach a trailer full of kayaks too. When I told John, he said, "Go right ahead! Don't let me stop you." So that meant this was going to be all my job. I was willing to accept that.
As the year progressed, spring finally arrived. I reminded John of my plan and again it was all my job. John had too much to do the way it was, he said. So I asked for some help from my friend, Cindy, and her son, Justin. They were visiting from Waukesha and it was the week before the parade.
We went to work with the supplies I had picked up earlier. For those of you who haven't seen a 1983 Land Cruiser, it looks just like an African safari vehicle. It is a box-like hunk of steel that can go through just about anything when you put it in 4 wheel drive. Ours had rust spots all over the bottom half of it so I started with them.
I took a can of rust inhibitor spray which was in a rust color. I sprayed every rust spot with the primer spray. I gave Justin the can after I sprayed about half the car and told him to spray every spot. There were so many spots that Justin kept asking if I was sure. After that I took a black enamel paint and brush and painted around each rust spot with a ( or ) type mark. Now the spots looked leopard-like. We now had a real safari vehicle. My friend, Cindy, thought this was hilarious and she was our comic relief. She kept making jokes about how I was having our vehicle repainted redneck style, etc. She was pretty funny.
We had some old stencils in the basement from the painting of signs around the resort. I used them and the spray to put "Pine Forest Lodge Safari" on the doors. John had been hearing all the laughing and seeing all the customers coming over to make comments, etc. So he came out to contribute. He painted the Safari on the doors. I knew he would get involved.
Our friend/customer, Don, came over and said that the car needed some teeth in the front. Cindy agreed and said it needed eyes then too. She took the black duct tape I had and ripped it into strips to make cat-like eyes on the headlights and then added eye lashes. It looked pretty cool and secretly I wanted them to stay on forever.
Don then got some white cardboard from the lodge, cut it to make teeth and duct taped them to the front. Then a customer said we needed to put something in the teeth. I had the perfect idea and told John. He went and got our stuffed and mounted musky from the garage and hung it very carefully on the front of the vehicle in between the teeth. It looked like our safari vehicle was eating the musky, which was so funny that Cindy was in a rolling laughter by now.
A customer then said that we needed a tail and so they went to work on that. After some piping insulation, some duct tape and a piece of dog toy for the top, it was a tail. Senna, our golden retriever, rips all the stuffing out of stuffed animal toys and so a "carcass" stuffed toy was used for the tuft at the end of the tail.
We attached our kayak trailer full of kayaks, put red, white and blue hankerchiefs around our dog's necks and off we went the morning of the parade.
As John and I rode in the front, I made the dogs bark down the parade route (2 blocks). People loved it. John had to be very careful of children running out in the road in front of him to pick up candy from the previous float. I was throwing out Pine Forest Lodge key chains out the windows. I know that's lame, but I didn't think to buy candy.
We made it through the 2 blocks and back to the resort with ease. The parade was fun but we said we wouldn't do it again. I left the picture of what the Toyota looked like all decorated, back in Mercer. So maybe in the future I will remember to post that picture. For now you'll have to visualize it in your mind. I hope you enjoyed this story.
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