Our annual St. Patrick's Day parade float wouldn't be possible without the hard work and dedication of a lot of people. Our founder, Peach, her husband, Ted, and our managing partner, Dave, provide the vision, support and patience needed to accomplish this project every year.
A big thank you to Scott Zaremba and Zarco66. Scott gave us a place to build the float (and it was indoors!), provided the trailer for us to build our volcano on and even pulled our float in the parade. Zarco66 also provided breakfast for our float crew on Thursday morning. The biscuits & gravy and breakfast burritos were delicious!
Thanks also to Sandbar Subs (23rd Street location) for providing dinner for our annual pre-parade social with the crew from Kennedy Glass on Wednesday night.
You'll be hearing more about Backdoor Bakery pretty soon. They gave us cupcakes and cookies as a treat after float dance practice- and oh my goodness, their baked goods are amazing. Cupcakes to die for!
Amelia Madl of Premier Mobile Spray Tan came into town on Tuesday before St. Pat's and held a spray tan party upstairs at the Sandbar. Nearly all of the ladies on our float were able to stop by for a quick tan. Thanks to Amelia for hanging around for almost five hours to make sure everyone looked lovely and tan!
And of course, huge thanks to everyone who helped design and build our float or who participated on parade day. We always say that building the float is half the fun, and this year was no exception. Our friends are the best!
Editor's note: Pretty sure I'm forgetting people. If you did something worthy and wish to be publicly thanked, let us know in the comments.
Another St. Patrick's Day has come and gone, and we're still recovering from all the fun. The weather was perfect, the crowds were great and we had as much fun as we always do!
This year, we got back to our roots and designed a tropical-themed float complete with a working volcano and lots of tiki heads, grass skirting and floral accents:
Above: our float lined up on 13th St., hours before the parade started, and the float and all its riders at the Flamingo Club after the parade.
We had a great time singing and dancing down Massachusetts Street to "Hot Hot Hot," "Volcano," and "Scatman." Dave led the float crew and the crowd in a massive sing-along. We even had a bongo player front and center on the float.
Here's a short video of our float, shot by our friend Wendy:
6NewsLawrence included our float in their parade highlight video.
And, the LJWorld included our float in their video. You can see us around the 1:20 mark.
We have a few more video clips we'll share later. Some of the float, and some of the shenanigans on float day.
The annual parade ended at the Flamingo Club in North Lawrence, where food, drinks and the awards ceremony awaited. We're proud and excited that once again, we won the grand prize traveling trophy!
If you're on Facebook, you can check out our St. Patrick's Day photo album for pictures of float-building and the big day. (You have to be logged into Facebook, and 21 or older, in order to view our page.)
We'll be posting the pictures to our Flickr page soon, also, for those of you who aren't on Facebook.
The annual Lawrence St. Patrick's Day Parade is tomorrow at 1 p.m. Word has it that our float will be near the end of the long parade, so be sure to stick around to see us!
This week was full of last minute preparations:
Last night, we held another spray tan party upstairs at the bar for all the ladies on the float. Oh, and Andrew. Amelia of Premier Mobile Spray Tan came to town to make us brown, and it took her nearly almost five hours to finish everyone. Even our driver, Scott, decided to have a tan. It was a lucrative night for Amelia.
I put on a shamrock-shaped sticker last night before I got my tan, in hopes that I could take a picture of the tan line so you could see just how good a spray tan looks, but unfortunately the sticker didn't stick well and the shamrock is more of a white blob.
Update: Caroline, a Sandbar regular and float participant, managed to get a much better shamrock:
Then tonight, we had our annual meet-and-greet with our friendly float competitors from Kennedy Glass. Marty and Patty used to help build the Sandbar float once upon a time, but then they decided the parade could use another float so they took their talents back to their own shop. Since then, we've enjoyed a friendly competition to see who can build a bigger float.
The Kennedy Glass crew came over to our float headquarters to check out our creation and enjoy dinner courtesy of Sandbar Subs.
The construction crew is putting on a few last minute touches tonight and then we'll be ready for the chaos of St. Patrick's Day!
The other day I searched for "Sandbar" on the LJWorld.com site to see if anything interesting came up. I used to do this on a more regular basis, but the search results didn't seem to work very well. The search results still seem to be funky sometimes, but occasionally they work for me.
It was a stroll down memory lane checking out the LJW archives.
They've got a picture of almost every St. Patrick's Day parade float we've built:
And so much more. More float pictures, block party pictures and videos and random pictures from New Year's eve celebrations and the cardboard boat race parade that used to take place downtown.
We love looking back at floats from the past to see how far we've come! Every year Dave wants to build something bigger and better than the year before. We can't wait to show off this year's float- we think you'll like it!
