So, I've been meaning to write about the kite festival we went to a couple weeks ago. "Festival" might be too strong of a word for this event, but "A bunch of people flying kites in the vicinity of a Caribou Coffee tent and a climbing wall" is both uninspiring and too long to fit on a poster.
Doesn't matter. It was a blast.
Being that it was on Milwaukee's lakefront, and was free, we arrived soon after it opened at 10 a.m. to assure parking, and also to leave ample time for the wee one's afternoon nap. I'll admit it, at first I was disappointed because there were no 80-foot-long kites like the one in the paper that enticed me to this event. A big rainbow wind sock, yes, but no humongous kites. We walked around for a bit, enjoying the Lake Michigan view and watching as people tried to get their kites airborne. I was thinking of just calling it a morning and then Jon suggested we head over to the kite shop and buy a kite. Sure, what the heck.
After a few unsuccessful attempts -- the kind where your kite spins around before taking a nosedive into the grass, Jon and I succeeded in getting our $7 purchase in the air...and higher and higher. There was the added challenge of keeping your kite away from the others in the air, but it was so much fun. It has been a LONG time since I've flown a kite. It required concentration, yet in a way that's relaxing. (Between that and the sandbox, it was a weekend of Zen.)
At one point, after I'd handed the string over to Jon and Owen, I looked around and it was just the coolest thing to be sitting along the lake with a couple hundred other people, many of them flying kites. And there was sort of this distant whir -- the sound of so many plastic kites flapping in the wind.
1 comment:
OH, I miss the kite festival! The last time I went they had some HUGE kites, too...not a whole lot of them, but a few...and a stunt kite team, too, which was just pretty darned incredible...
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