The Dundas Cactus Festival

Still catching up on posts...

A couple of weeks back, after we got back from Montreal/Ottawa, Dundas had its annual Cactus Festival. Summer festivals are big around here and many of the small townships have them. It helps with tourism a little, and with small business commerce as shops can set up stall in the main streets. And everyone here seems to love parades...

The Dundas Cactus Festival parade went right outside our house! Here's proof:

The parade was quite something! It went for 45-50mins, and included 5 (or was it 6) marching bands, two of which had bagpipes (extremely cool!). Can I remember who they were? The Salvos, the police band, the scouts, the Burlington somebody's, and another one. There were a number of other musical acts too, eg 3 orbands mic'd up on the back of a semi-trailer, and a couple of local dance troupes with boom boxes. The parade also serves as some small-scale advertising for local businesses, which went to varying levels of effort from having a painted van through to having a horse and buggy or float of some description.

Lots of people turned out on the street to watch. Forgi and I sat on our porch eating seasonal watermelon and drinking home-made ginger beer!

I'm just looking through my photos to see what else there was - and it's too many thing to put photos up of everything. There was: an out-house on wheels; a kendo demonstration; a cactus made of balloons; a troop of footsoldiers in the traditional red and white army fatigues; a white limousine; several floats from the "Rameses Shriners", a men's club where you need to be a senior Mason just to join (they wear those Egyptian "fez" hats); a half-dozen go carts zooming around; a trailer with 5 people on exercise bikes; a clown; and the local fire truck

BTW, the whole "cactus" bit relates to a cactus that used to belong to a local plant shop. But it closed. And the cactus moved somewhere else. But they still have the festival!

Mike and Jan are back in town again. We'll get them to do a guest blog on Niagara Falls shortly! Bye!