Small town Aurora

I grew up *near* a small town, not even actually *in* the town so I know what a really small town is like. Aurora is decidedly not that. It is the second-largest city in the state of Illinois (which sounds more impressive than it is, I think) and has a definite city personality.

But I have to say that we put on one very small town 4th of July Parade. This is the second year our family has attended - minus the spousal unit this year - and it's just not a big city event. Which makes it more appealing to me for sure.

First of all, the parade is supposed to start at 10 AM. We arrive at 9:15 to secure our spot - which may sound late to folks from say, Arlington Heights, who have been advised to stop reserving their places days in advance and asked to voluntarily wait until 7 PM the night before to stake a curbside claim. In the case of Aurora, we get downtown at 9:15 and I really did think this - "Do we have the right day?" There are huge stretches of street that look like any other normal weekend morning (because everything is closed) and an intersection that I'm pretty sure the parade is supposed to go through isn't even blocked off yet. I am 99.9% sure I have the right day so after verifying the right location via cell with folks we are meeting up with, we put down our blanket and chairs and wait for almost 40 minutes for them to block the intersection for the parade that's allegedly going to start in 5 minutes. Eventually the cars stop flowing so apparently they cut access at the other end. It's just about 10 by this point.

Shortly after 10, a bicycle cop casually rides by. Boys with our group are playing the street, my youngest is trying to join them (and being blocked by me). And here comes a golf cart whizzing around the corner telling the kids to get off the street, here comes the parade.

I suppose most people expect parades to have lots of floats and bands and Shriners in little cars. We get lots of politicians (the mayor went around twice, once as mayor in a carriage and once on foot as candidate for mayor), some church groups, some local businesses (Geek Squad actually had the largest presence in the parade with something like 15 or 16 vehicles - they just kept coming, it was pretty funny), a few Cub Scout packs, and of course, the police and fire trucks. I wish there were more fire trucks.

Some special highlights for us lucky Aurorans -
1. A fire truck from the Aurora Fire Museum. Such a cool place, located about a block from the parade route in the city's first fire station.
2. Some Revolutionary War reenactors who fired their weapons RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. My eldest and my mother were ecstatic. I'm glad I had the presence of mind to cover N's ears.
3. Lots of people handing out all sorts of advertisements - for community theater productions, candidates for office, and churches primarily. The most worthy that we got was for Honor Flight Chicago, an organization that flies veterans, especially WWII veterans, to their memorial in DC, at no cost to the veteran. They've taken two flights from Aurora and have two more scheduled. Very cool stuff. Some of the veterans themselves were in the parade.

There were only two (maybe three?) marching bands and one is a summer band camp. The best was probably West Aurora High School.

One decidedly big city feature of our parade is that the horses (what parade is complete without horses?) are followed by a streetsweeper. Both groups got their own streetsweeper. I'm guessing most small towns have a slightly more manual scooper method for horse-doody clean-up. Us big city folks pull out the big guns.

And the most nagging question for me - who decided that the only way to distribute candy is to fling it on the ground? Everyone who gave out candy did that - threw it, on the ground, at the curb. I guess they don't want to hurt anyone but apparently the streetsweepers are resting before the parade instead of warming up by cleaning the parade route because the street near us was just GROTTY. Yuck, yuck, yuck. My pale green shoes came home black and I had to keep stopping N from picking cigarette butts out of the street. So flinging EDIBLES on the dirty nasty street was, frankly, just gross. I did let my kids eat most of it anyway, though. What kind of mom would I be if I didn't?