Don't Rain on My Parade

We've worked the Troutdale day camps for eight years now, and we've managed to escape rain on our annual "Summerfest" parade day for seven of them. I do remember two parade mornings that drizzled just a bit, but ultimately the rain held off in both cases. Admittedly, we usually only have to worry about Saturday rain during parade week because we're always horribly far behind on constructing the floats that carry our campers. We spent early mornings and late evenings all week working on various parts of the floats, and on the night before the parade, we would work until dark trying to put everything together.

This year, for various reasons (not all of them discernible), we managed not to spend any extra time working on the floats. We planned carefully and worked a little bit every day, and by Friday, we were ready to build both floats. Our campers helped us staple and glue everything on, and before lunchtime, the rickety old trailers from the Parks Department had been transformed into a cars-and-trucks exhibition and a planes-and-boats display, both bright and colorful and cheery.

We'd been watching the weather forecast carefully all week, and no one could really be sure if we'd end up with rain or shine. Monday's forecast was rain on Friday, sun on Saturday. Tuesday's forecast was rain on Thursday and Sunday, sun on Saturday. By Wednesday, the rain was expected to hit on Saturday. (Try to keep up... here's where it gets confusing.) On Friday, we were supposed to have rain. Instead, it was beautiful and sunny with a cloudless blue sky. This made us question the rain predicted for Saturday. Would it really rain? Would it be sunny like Friday? Would the rain hold off until the afternoon, at least?

It was too risky... So we sent one of our staff to Home Depot to buy painters' plastic drop cloths. Then we draped them over the sides of the floats, covering the pictures. The campers had painted them on cardboard and paper using tempera paint, which is, as the name suggests, temporary (water-soluble). I confess that when I went home Friday night, I never expected it to rain at all... but if it did, the floats would be drippy, soggy messes, and the floats were going to be stored outside all night, so we had to take precautions.

On Saturday morning, when I got up at 6:30 a.m., it was POURING down rain. I figured we would be able to remove the plastic when the rain stopped, but it never actually did stop raining. So we kept the plastic on. Our kids rode down Main Street on plastic-wrapped floats. You could see the pictures nicely through the plastic, and the paint didn't run, so it was obviously a good choice on our part. Several of the by-standers seemed to think it was funny, so I would consider it another successful parade.