Pre-Festival Action

So, at 1:30 we loaded up onto the Nabuta Festival Tour Bus. We were on the purple one. Joined by the Mansburgers, Chaplain David, Angel, Jonathan(barely visible) and Jacob (in front), Ben the babysitter extraordinaire (yellow shirt), his mother Miriam and his sister Alexandria (tourquoise). Others too but not in our posse. The trip took approximately 2 hours. The festival didn't start until 7:00pm, but there was prep work to be done.We made the requisite stop about half way there, so one and all could potty. I thought it was a cute rest stop, so I wanted everyone to be able to see it. Once we arrived in Aomori City we had to get ourselves to the perfect parade spot. On the way we passed the painted fire hydrant. I knew everyone would want to see that too. I took over 300 pictures, but blogspot can be a piece of crap blog site. So I have no idea of how very few photos may actually make it. I've been trying to put pictures on for about 8 hours now, and I've gotten exactly 3 on so far.

Angel and I went out in search of food etc after we staked our corner of the street. We came across a cake in the shape of a castle. We felt obliged to go in and see what else the store made, the fact the store had air conditioning also encouraged in to the store. They had valentines cakes (hopefully made more recently than valentine's day, Halloween cakes, and the best of all from the people that love you best . . . the cake with a drunk man on top.