1st Ever Salinas Valley Pride Parade!

I got fried shrimp and fried chicken because I just wasn’t in the mood for Mexican food but it was good. Rob fell in love with the salsa and the nice waitress gave us a small vat of it to go. On the way back from lunch we saw a sign for an estate sale and stopped. It was pretty cool and I got some silver and gold candles for my altar-in-the-making and a candle snuffer for them. We also got some bowls and I got this speech to text thing that pretty much doesn’t work right but it was only a couple of bucks. Heh.

At that estate sale they told us of another one down the street so we stopped there after. It was a HUGE house but everything was overpriced in my opinion. It was the perfect sale for a collector. They had a lot of vintage and fun stuff like an old coin operated scale and a cash register.  Just not for us.

We dropped off the parents and did some shopping at Nob Hill before returning home where I tried for hours to get the speech software to work properly and finally gave up. I had an email from the Salinas Valley Pride organizer to call him so I did. He was calling all the volunteers to let them know that there were going to be protesters and just to remind us that at no time are we to let them instigate us. We are just to ignore them.

After talking to him I called my mom because she left a guilt ridden message on our answering machine while we were at the Poison show that she didn’t have Southwests number and she needed me to call her with it. Heh. Nothing like dialing information right? Anyway, we talked for about a half an hour and then I took a bath.

This morning we woke up and headed into Salinas again. This time for the first ever Salinas Valley Pride Parade. When I got there, I signed in as a volunteer and got a T shirt, read the security information and then waited to be told what to do. Rob had headed off to the grocery store to do the rest of the shopping for Vegas.

I volunteered to head off the south end of the parade where it started along with a couple other people to block it off and allow ppl through as necessary. We were armed with wristbands and fliers to hand out. The wristbands were important because the parade was insured. If you were wearing a wristband and god forbid something happened, you were taken care of financially under the parade insurance. I thought that was a good call. I also thought that it was sad that we had to do such a thing, but it was smart.

So we all stood around after blockading the road and eventually started banding people as they came in. Some people wanted nothing to do with us as they were just passing through but the majority were there for the parade and happy to be there. We were supposed to have police there helping direct traffic but they arrived about an hour late. Luckily there wasn’t much of a problem. People saw the barricades and changed direction.

We did experience the protesters. They came in, most refusing wristbands and they were trying to hand out the these small pieces of paper stating some religious stuff.  They were very polite and gathered at the end of the parade with signs.  It was a peaceful protest as we were told and they had every right to be there as did anyone else so it was cool.

The parade itself was bigger than I thought it was going to be. Not to mention the people that came to see it. It was larger and I’m glad for it. We got thanked a lot as volunteers by the people coming in to watch. They understood how huge this was for Salinas and I was very happy to be a small part of it.  It’s a tinystep but I can see this becoming something big in the years to come.  The turn out showed us that there was a definite need for it despite the naysayers.