Tuesday, September 11, 2007

A Day at The Car Show


"... nothing like an old-car show to close the summer with, the smell of fresh-popcorn wafting in the air, baloons and fiddle players, childrens with painted faces running around..."

... and people with cellphones clipped onto their ears... :) oh, well, so much for tradition... but hey, there are seems to be more cars and goers this year at the annual Downtown Festival at Denton Texas. 

About 30 minutes from Dallas on I-35E, Denton, which could be considered a suburb of Dallas, is the home of the University of North Texas (famous for its Jazz music program).

Thanks to online maps, finding my way there is not the least problematic. Keeping my daughter cool under the scorching Texas sun, is another story.  By the way, this would be my first date with my daughter that involves more than an hour driving, half of which, thankfully, she took her afternoon nap.

We arrived at the downtown area, all parking spots are practically full.  We meandered around, already building the anticipation upon seeing tons of people, nothing could put a damper on the mood when seeing a "festival" with barely enough people to run it.

Having found our parking spot, my daughter and I made our way to the town hall proper where the festival is centered around.  We were stopped by a handful of friendly people from the local church handing out cold bottled water and a BIG 100 dollar bill look-a-like with the Ten Commandments printed on the other side. Neat!

Then I whipped out my Ansco Super Speedex, especially loaded with expired Kodak Portra UC 400 for this occasion.  I started taking pictures of the cars, the people, the beautiful sky, whatever.  It sounded easy, but it's more work than I thought, because I want to keep an eye on my daugther all the time.  Add to that, I tried to slap a filter in front of the lens and manually compensate for it.

Beautiful summer clouds over the downtown:


Just another red car (albeit beautiful, stylistic, and with attitudes :):


A face painting session, that's not my daughter, by the way:


A Studabaker Commander (also known as, the Cloud Reflector):


Almost on top of the keyboard player:


I don't know why this reminds me of "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned..."


I'm a Texan and so is my car:


Now this is just sick...:



We only spent less than an hour there because of the heat, other than that, my daughter seems to enjoy the butterfly painting on her arm, the music (very cool Jazz/Blues/Rock'n'roll band playing), and the baloons.

Next year, you bet we're coming back, and this time, Mom's gotta go too.

1 comment:

Jim Wilson said...

Nice journal. We especially like the picture of our "Cloud Reflector" which we call "Ms. Baker". She was Diane's grandfather's car new in 1953. We were especially proud to win second place against all those 1950s Chevrolets!! See you this year at the show.