St. Patrick's Day

We took advantage of beautiful weather this St. Patrick's Day and headed to downtown Denver for the parade.


To say it was crowded would be an understatement. This was a crush of green-clad humanity, much of it reeking of beer at 11:00 in the morning. It was crazy! I have never seen so many people dressed in green in one spot. We linked hands with the kids in a single line and squeezed between the people gathered on the sidewalks to watch the parade. We finally found a bit of room to expand and parked ourselves.


I don't know that Matthew had ever seen so many people. If you look across the street you can see rows of people sitting and standing wherever there was room. This picture doesn't do the crowd justice--we were closer to dozens of strangers than we would be to family.

Then the parade came by! Dancers, fire trucks, a little of everything.

And at one point, a lot of scooters!

Part of the crowd where we were was always fluid, people jockeying for better viewing, crossing from the sunny side over to our shady side. So, the longer we stayed, the more people pressed in around us. There was a cop there for a while yelling at people that they couldn't cross the street and sending them back to the sunny side away from our shade. But then he moved down the parade route to yell at other people and the street-crossing began again.

A few feet away from us, a short man holding a stroller above his head tried to work his way onto the sidewalk, his wife and baby right behind. He squeezed by a man whose patience was spent, who might have drunk something, and who was already angry. He hit this man with his stroller, apparently. There were angry, dirty words yelled and stroller man roughly dropped the stroller on the ground and went after angry man with choice words. Stroller man's wife also unleashed a torrent of naughty words and started hitting this man with her free hand, her baby being held to her hip by the other. We decided the parade was over for us and took off for the bus at the 16th Street Mall.


We enjoyed getting to the city and partaking of the green festivities and riding the free bus...and, while witnessing potential assault was exciting, I think I'd prefer a quieter parade!