Hanging with the Crowd

This week marks the annual winter carnival festivities for the small town in which Heir Head Manor is located.  Last Friday I was zooming home late from work eager to get dinner started when a huge glow out on the lake caught my eye.  It was a roaring bonfire made from stack upon stack of Christmas trees that people had dried out and saved to pile up and burn to cinders while they consumed huge bowls of chili under a cold starry night sky.

The next day's festivities kicked off with ice hockey in a space they had cleared out on the lake and a golf tournament.  My Sunshine and I really wanted to pay the entrance fee and join the golfers zooming around the lake on skates trying to hit their balls into the holes marked with flags, but alas to enter the tournament you needed your own set of golf clubs something we do not possess.

This weekend is the pancake breakfast and bicycle race across the ice.  My mother keeps insisting that I enter the race.  Since the temperature is likely to be similar this weekend to what it was last weekend I do not relish the thought of trying to race across the ice wearing my snow pants and riding an old fashioned cruiser bicycle in baby blue with a scarf burka style across my face.

Nothing spells crash, burn, and permanent brain damage to me like taking a bike out on the ice.  Leave it to my mother to push and cajole the idea despite the risk of serious injury.  "You just have to do that" she begged "just go it will be fun."

Next year I will make sure to enter my mother in the race and as she flies across the ice on an old fashioned cruiser Jessica Fletcher style basket and all I can just hear her screams.   For now I am content to just watch and work towards getting to know a few of the locals. 

Who knows maybe by next year I will have made it on to the planning committee for the festival and I can add my own event.  Something like ice skating yoga with steaming mugs of Starbucks at the end, or cake pop races try and make it to the end of the course and back before your cake pop slides down the stick.

This weekend I'll just be happy to get a few hello's from some friendly faces as I watch the daredevils brave enough to speed across the ice on two wheels and a prayer.  Knowing that next year I'll be right in the thick of it joining the local tradition of hundreds of people eating large quantities of beans around a roaring fire, but at least the firemen are standing by.