One of the bigger festivals in Rochester, New York is the Lilac Festival. It is held every year in Highland Park and is always well attended. Last Saturday, after the ring ceremony for the Order of the Engineer, Anne and I had some time to kill. Dave had gone back to his apartment to clean and pack. We were going to get together with him again, later for dinner, but until then we had a few hours, so we went to the Lilac Festival.
Well attended is a bit of an understatement. It was crowded. The festival has three parts, the lilacs and other pretty flowers that grace Highland Park, an arts and crafts area and the food. We mainly hung out with the lilacs. It was less crowded than either of the other two areas. The pictures of the fauna with this post were taken in the park.
Whenever I travel to a new region of the country, I find new birds. While the Grey Catbird is native to Missouri, I have never seen it here. It is not a particularly flashy or showy bird, but it does have a distinctive song. Even the Cardinals in Rochester seemed different from the ones we have here in Saint Louis. The Saint Louis Redbird is a uniformly bright red bird. The one pictured with this post, has the same bright red head and breast, but the wings appear noticeably darker. The city of Rochester has both chipmunks and squirrels, but in Saint Louis chipmunks are not very prevalent. We did see lots of flowers too and also took quite a few pictures of them. Don’t worry; they eventually will appear as blog fodder.
After we had had our fill of flowers and fauna, we did stop by the food concessions. Anne had a smoothie and I had a Genny Light. Beer, I assume brewed from the waters of the Genesee River, the same river that flows by Dave’s Alma Mater. We also stopped by the arts and crafts booths. There were three different booths all basically hawking the same wares. Their similar product sets were photographic alphabets of letters. These photographs of letters gleemed from interesting architectural details or unusual natural formations each of them that resembled letters of the alphabet were sold as letters in a sign that a prospective customer could designed.
Today is this blog’s second birthday!