St. Johns Mint Festival

Every year, St. Johns (a town about 30 minutes north of here) celebrates its Mint Festival during the second weekend in August.  As kind of a spur of the moment decision, we decided to make the drive up there with the kids and check out the festivities.  We arrived just in time to see the parade -- and what a parade it was!  In addition to the usual floats, there were a ton of tractors and some horses.  It's farming country up there, so some of the people were even passing out vegetables (heads of cauliflower, green peppers, ears of corn, summer squash, etc).  We even received some frozen ice pops!

Posing for the obligatory photo for Momma before settling in for the parade:

 

The girls found a front-row seat for all of the action and managed to score some candy from some of the floats.  They thought that is was the best thing ever!

 

 

I had anticipated that Jack would simply take a nap in the stroller for most of the morning, but some of the floats/music/horns kept him from being able to rest comfortably.  As a result, he got to enjoy the scenery with Momma too.

 

 

After watching most of the parade, we decided to beat the crowd and head farther down the street in search of more activities.  It was a long walk for Sophia, so she suckered her daddy into carrying her most of the distance:

 



The girls noticed the park right away, so we spent the majority of our time there.  It worked out well because Jack was hungry by then and I was able to feed him on one of the benches while the girls burned off a lot of energy.

There was a princess castle:

Lots of swings:

 

 

Many stairs/slides/tunnels:

 

 

A tire swing:

 

 And a purple dinosaur.  Yes, the girls couldn't seem to resist this creature!

After the girls had exhausted themselves, we headed into the Kids' Activities Barn so that the girls could play a few games.  I stayed there with all of the kids while Steve made the trip back to get the van.  By the time that the girls were done (having used up all of their tickets), we were able to meet back up with Steve. 

Choosing a sucker to see if they were a winner:

 

Picking a duck out of the pool to see how many prize tickets they won:

 



 

 

Rolling balls for prize tickets:

 

Once all of their playing tickets were used up, they were able to turn in their prize tickets.  I let them choose their own prizes ... Sophia picked a small magna-doodle board and Samantha chose a Dr. Seuss bag with multiple prizes inside.  Personally, I think that she made out like a bandit because the bag contained stickers, markers, coloring books, etc.

Posing with their prizes (and blue lips from their suckers):

The kids had such a great time!  In fact, Sam has already started asking when we can go back again ...