At The Kite Festival

Welcome aboard to new “Followers” Sherry and Charley Dilworth.  I appreciate the time you take in your day to read this blog and follow along with our RV adventures.  THANK YOU very much for coming along.

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Bruce thought the alarm was turned off when we went to sleep last night.  Wrong!!!  Today we had the chance to sleep in but the alarm went off at our babysitting wake-up time of 5:30 am.  Great way to start the day.  Grrrrrrrr. 

The day started out very overcast here in Long Beach, but the clouds began to blow away by the time we headed out to the beach area for the Kite Festival.  We told the Grands we’d take them into the town to see the kites and do some shopping.  They wanted to buy a Long Beach sweatshirt.

                                                           A variety of shopping stalls were set up with the usual “stuff” for sale.

There were so many beautiful kites on display.   There were also the usual assortment of flying gadgets folks plunk out in front of their RV’s.  You could buy anything from a Nemo to an old fashioned car to flying dragonflies that will indicate wind strength and direction. 

                                           Mackenzie and Zoey posed with some kites flying overhead.  
We all started out wearing warm coats and by the time we finished up at the beach and walked toward downtown, it was time to change into lightweight jackets.  The clouds were beginning to break up and the sun was shining down on us.

                                                               Arrrrrrr!  You could buy pirate flags and banners here.

 

                                                          It was like a sea of beautiful colors.

There are a lot of different competition areas for this whole kite business that I hadn’t really known about before.  I’m not much of a kite flier.  There are the dual line and multi-line categories for a sport kite.  Sometimes kites are flown to music (very loud music playing on large speakers) in a ballet category.  Then there is the precision competitions and various other skill levels.  Kites are remote controlled sometimes too.  All very complicated and important from what I could see. 

We went into a bakery on the main street.  The girls picked out doll cupcakes.  Bruce and I got a cinnamon roll.  The place was jammed with people so we figured the baked goods must be really good.  We figured correctly!

I also took a photo of the girls with the world’s largest frying pan.  This has been here in Long Beach since at least the 1970’s when my folks came here for a vacation and took a photo of it.

Before we left to go back to the motorhome we made a stop at the rip-off center…..I mean, the arcade and amusement ride center.  The cost of tickets was $1.00 each.  Rides required 3 tickets per person.  OK then….we told them they could get one ride and one ride only.  Sheesh!  Disneyland could be cheaper than this place if you stayed here all day and played the arcade games and rode the few things they have.  The girls wanted to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl so I figured I better go along since Zoey was under age for riding alone.  So $9.00 later for the one ride, we took our turn.  At least the guy gave us a really long ride for our $9.00. 

                                                           We leaned to the side to make it whirl faster.

We didn’t even know it was Kite Festival when we book our reservation.  Just got lucky with that.  The town was filled with cars and people but the RV park is very quiet.  After the Tilt-a-Whirl we went back to the relative quiet of the RV.  It’s never quiet inside the RV when the Grands are there.  It was a good day.

Until next time…..so long for now!