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Every year, my family reserves a spot on Highway 41 to watch the Edison Pageant of Lights Parade. For those of you not in the Southwest Florida area, this parade (along with a week of festivities) honors the inventor, Thomas Edison, who had his winter home in Ft. Myers. I used to march in this parade when I was in the Royal Lancers Drum & Bugel Corps, and later as a member of the Cape Coral High School Seahawks Marching Band.

Nowadays, I just sit back and watch. However, this isn't just an ordinary parade where you can show up an hour beforehand and find a place on the sidewalk. We reserve our spot about 2 months ahead of time using rope, tape, and landscapers paint. On the day of the parade, we set up camp (so-to-speak) starting at about 9:00am for an 8:00pm parade. It's quite an event, and we made a real spectacle of ourselves... but we have a lot of fun doing it.

A week before the big parade, the city holds a smaller parade called The Children's Parade. This is a daytime parade and most of the participants are children. Here's our crowd setup just outside the Harborside Convention Hall.

My sister, Janet, organized a group of kids from the school where she teaches to march in The Children's Parade. They each made colorful masks and created hand puppets (inspired by puppets at EPCOT). Here's Angel doing her part in the parade.

Preparing for the big parade, we setup early. And even though it's only February, it is Florida and it gets hot, so we come prepared to spend the day in the sun.

Several years ago, we figured out the benefits of renting a porta-potty for ourselves. This year, a news crew was out interviewing those nutcases who spend all day waiting for the parade (and yes, Mom was interviewed), and they decided to use our porta-potty as an interesting backdrop for one segment.

By 2 or 3 o'clock, the crowd starts arriving. Everyone brings food, and of course, we have loads to share with everyone else. Fried chicken, dirty rice, Mom's potato salad, deviled eggs, fruit salad, and of course, Diane's famous chocolate chip cookies. Needless to say, we don't go hungry.

Close to parade time, we back up the pickup trucks to the sidewalk so that everyone can have a good view.

As you can see, the place gets pretty crowded by parade time.

In addition to the seats in the back of the pickup trucks, we fill the sidewalk with chairs (everyone brings at least one chair). Notice the runners in the background; before the parade, the city holds a running race... this year, both Kenny and Christopher ran.

By this time, it gets too dark to get any good pictures, so I usually stop taking pictures after the running race. Besides, it's hard to take pictures when you're standing on the back of a truck, yelling "Play! Play! Play!" to the bands trying to get them to play... we actually have a pretty good track record of getting the bands to play in front of us... though, I usually lose my voice in the process.

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