A Weekend Full Of Festivals

This past weekend, in addition to the Cheesman Park Art Fest, the city of Golden - just to the west of Denver - held Buffalo Bill Days.  In addition, the annual Dragon Boat Festival was held at Denver's Sloans Lake.  I decided to take advantage of all three, and after spending Saturday afternoon at Cheesman Park, I decided to attend the other two festivals on Sunday.  I started the afternoon at Buffalo Bill Days, and was surprised to find that Buffalo Bill was still alive and kicking, mixing with the crowd at his festival. He is supposed to be buried on nearby Lookout Mountain, but perhaps they bring him back each year just for this festival.

My next stop was the Dragon Boat Festival, but as I approached Sloan's Lake, it started to rain, and I decided to just drive around the neighborhood until the rain let up.  It finally did, and I arrived just in time to see the grand finale, which consisted of all four dragon boats racing around the lake several times.  The boats are pretty far off, so you don't feel very close to the action, but there was still a big crowd watching.  There were also plenty of food booths serving every type of Asian food.  As far as I could tell, nothing still alive, thank goodness.

I have attended this festival a number of times, and have never taken very good photographs there.  The area where it is set up is treeless, a large field with booths strung out across it, and various food carts set up in the parking areas.  The best part of the festival are the dragon boats themselves, one of which can be seen in the photograph on the left.  After the final race, the boat crews wasted no time in removing the drums and dragon heads from the boats, so I had to take that photograph quickly.   And while there did I sample some of the food, since Asian food is one of my favorites?  Hell no! They were charging money for it, and you know how I feel about that.