The Motorcycle Diaries, Kansas Edition: Abilene, Kansas 4th of July

 Spent the last few days doing wiring and helping out around the house.  Updated some of those activities in the last edition but yesterday got the 120V wiring all closed up and powered.  Everything in the back porch has power and works so all the extension cords got cleaned up and put away.  I still have to hook up the 240V but am planning on shutting off power to the house before I do that.  I'm not a total idiot.  😁

So Abilene Kansas 4th.  A patriotic but small town.  Abilene is located in Dickinson county.  The total population of the county is under 20,000.  I live in a town smaller than Abilene, with only about 5,000 resident, compared to Abilene's 9,000, but the difference is that my town is one of the smallest in my county, whereas Abilene is the largest town in this county.  It is amazingly sparsely populated.  The 4th of July celebrations were commensurately smaller when compared with home.  So what were the positives and negatives?

My town has a parade, a car show, vendors, and fireworks.  People come from all over the county and Canada to attend.  Hard to estimate how many show up but there are usually five to six blocks of classic cars and three to four blocks of vendors.

Abilene, on the other hand, had none of that except the fireworks.  There were other activities going on down in Eisenhower Park yesterday though.  Mud volleyball, turtle races, cornhole tournament, etc.  I drove by during the day just to check it out but the festivities were dampened by the monstrous rainstorm that hammered through right around 11 am.  I don't know what attendance would have looked like had the forecast not been so bad but there were very few people in the park.

In the evening, however, with the weather cleared and the air cool, there was a concert at the bandstand.  The Abilene Municipal Band, which has been around for 144 years, played an hour's worth of marches and patriotic music.  One number was the Lexington March, although I'm not sure if it was the Edmundson or the King version.  They invited all the kids in the audience to come up and march through the audience waving flags while they played.  I've included a short video here:

Afterwards we moved a block or so to the fields behind the community center for a spectacular fireworks show.  We were there a half hour or so and fireworks were going off all around during the whole wait time.  Some people had set up in the same field and entertained us for that whole half an hour before the actual show.  The show itself was outstanding.  I won't bore you with pictures of fireworks.  They looked like everyone else's firework pictures.  All in all it was very enjoyable.  It was great to see so many people thankful for America.  There were no politics whatsoever, just Americans celebrating the greatest country in the history of the world.