| Festival
Starts This Week |
| With less than a week before the Herndon Festival begins,
I was thinking about how much work goes into the event by
everyone who is associated with it. |
| The Herndon Festival may be an act of love, but it's powered
by sweat, hard work and many hours organization. |
| Many employees of the Town of Herndon, especially Art Anselene's
gang over at the Parks and Recreation Department, which does
the lion's share of the work, actually work on the Festival
for an entire year. The Festival starts May 30 with fireworks
and ends June 2. |
| In between those two dates more than 80,000 people will
parade through the downtown festival, eating, drinking, enjoying
carnival rides, buying arts and crafts, visiting the business
expo and visiting old friends and neighbors. |
| Of course, the Parks and Recreation Department isn't the
only group involved in the Herndon Festival. The Chamber of
Commerce organizes the Business Expo, and dozens of businesses
prepare their booths for the weekend event. |
| Restaurants are busy preparing food for their booths, musicians
are running through their final practices, the fireworks companies
are organizing their rockets, and the arts and crafts people
are boxing up stained glass, jewelry, wooden benches and garden
grimcracks to sell. |
| The Observer Newspapers have been busy with the Festival
as well. In 35,000 copies of today's edition there is the
annual Guide to the Herndon Festival, a publication we do
in cooperation with the Town of Herndon. It is the official
guide, and inside you'll find everything you need to know
about the Festival, from schedules, to maps to profiles of
the musicians. |
| And next week The Observer will produce a second guide to
the Festival, with stories, more profiles and details of the
four-day event. And we'll see you at our Business Expo booth
both Saturday and Sunday on Pine Street near the Russia House
restaurant. |
| Come on by and take a look at the thousands of old photographs
we have to give away. |
| The Festival is a special time of year in Herndon. It's
that one event for which thousands of people return home.
It's that time when, regardless of the weather, music and
food and fun and arts rule the day. It's that one event in
which everyone is a neighbor. |
| And it's that one event that truly defines a town. |
| And that's Our Town this week. |
