61st Annual Parada del Sol!

Saturday was the Parada Del Sol parade, in Scottsdale. Friday we girls got together and had a blast putting together flower "bustles" for the horses.  Basically, we used a foam floral block and stuck flowers all over and then used wire to hold it on to the saddles.  They turned out great!  Halle had made one similar before so she guided us through it and it went together quickly.

Elsa was looking rather…dusty, so we washed her up and used special purple whitening shampoo stuff (I know, that’s really confusing: purple stuff to turn a white horse actually white.). We loaded her in the trailer at 6:00, and we got to Scottsdale around 6:50. I was really nervous about Elsa, because she gets really nervous at new places. We had to unload her on the road, because the police had closed off the traffic for the parade, and we weren’t sure where the actual staging area was. We unloaded right next to the sidewalk, and met up with the other 2014 girls, and we put in the amazing tail bows my mom made, and the really nice flower-arrangement-saddle things that Halle, Brittany, and I made. We tacked up, and I was very impressed how well Elsa was behaving. People started trickling through the sidewalks, and a few people asked for pictures with my horse. And with me. I was really excited to wear my new chocolate hat and teal-and-tan boots.

Shannon and Makenna caught up with us within half an hour and we waited for the parade to start. I was looking around, and I saw this little tiny trailer, and I thought it was for tools or something, but it was actually a mini trailer for mini horses! They were so cute, and they looked like little puffballs of adorableness! I also saw these huge parade balloons. One of them was a green piggy bank, and the other was some kind of kangaroo. While we were waiting, we saw these amazing Arabian costumes, and the horses were so beautiful, and the costumes were very sparkly! It was so cool to see all the other groups of people that came to be in the parade. 

We waited some more on the road, in line for our turn to go. Elsa was doing very well, she was just tossing her head a lot, and she only stopped when she was going forward. I was walking in circles for a long time before she stopped doing that!

The actual parade was really fun, too. I discovered that smiling and waving hurts…a lot. At least, after you’ve done it for about an hour. I was very tired afterwards, but we all had a lot of fun.