No Chain: Western Tennessee Strawberry Festival Parade

After getting up early to make our final preparations for the parade we biked the 13 miles back to Humboldt, the site of the 73^rd annual Western Tennessee Strawberry Festival Parade. We decorated our bikes and support vans with balloons, streamers and chalk paint before traveling the 0.9 miles of the parade route. Thousands and thousands of people lined the road, all the schools in the area let out for the day and all of the business in town close; it was a pretty impressive turnout. I got the opportunity to meet both the Governor of Tennessee and Miss Tennessee before the real fun started. Biking slower than most of us probably thought possible we swerved back and forth, passed out candy and danced on our bikes through the throngs of people. One of our riders and best dancers, Roshan, really stole the show and had the whole crowd cheering him on as he break danced in the middle of the street to the music being played by the float in front of us. We had a lot of fun participating in and watching the rest of the parade while enjoying all of the fried fair food we could ever dream of. Our destination for the evening changed multiple times throughout the day due to flooding again so no route for the day was ever marked, still 4 of us took the time to get out on our bikes and put 30 or so miles in before being picked up in the support vans and being transported to our evening accommodations in Holenwald, Tennessee (We all refer to it as Hole-in-the-wall), it truly is a small town in the middle of the nowhere. Katie and I are currently getting our laundry done for our big weekend in Nashville, which also happens to be one of the hot spots in town on a Friday night. Can’t wait to ride out tomorrow and meet all my friends in Nashville for a great weekend. No chain!