doodledee

Today was the Edina Model Yacht Club's annual parade of boats down at Centennial Lakes park. It's an all day event that lets radio controlled boat geeks show off their toys to a reasonably appreciative crowd. I figured I qualify as 'reasonably appreciative' – or at least 'easily amused' – so I took junior down to check it out.

It was actually pretty neat. They had all the boats set up on tables inside this one big park building so you could walk around and see each boat up close and talk to the dude who owned it about how he built it and stuff. I was all set to make a bunch of "what's your favorite type of model glue to sniff?" type jokes, but then it turned out that most of the owner guys were like these really nice old grandpa types who were super excited that you wanted to hear about how they glued stuff together. Which - I quickly discovered - I *totally* did.

Outside they were having the "open water" portion of the show, which is where anyone who feels like it can just put their boat in the water and drive it around. That was cool because we got to see a sampling of everything. There were tons of sailboats, some military boats, a submarine, some speed boats, a couple of fishing boats, a huge ore tanker, and probably some other boats that I can't remember. Later in the day they were even going to float some little burning rafts out into the lake and let the dudes who built model fire department boats drive their boats out and put out the fires. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds frickin' awesome?

Centennial Lakes Park [edina]