Kite Fest

Today was Zilker Park's 80th Annual Kite Fest. We have never been, but our friends, the Beards, let us know about it. We packed our picnic and headed to the park right after church. We didn't have any idea of where to park, so we took the free shuttle from downtown. It was pretty good for getting there, but a pain for getting back because we had to stand in line for about 25 minutes to get on a shuttle to return to our car. The clouds kept threatening to rain on us, but only managed to sprinkle a couple of times. We spread out our blanket in front of the "competition field" for our picnic, but didn't see much except a lot of huge kites on the ground. We just figured they only went up at a certain time. Only later did we find out that they never went up today because it was TOO windy. Can you believe that...TOO windy for kites! We still had a good time watching all the other personal kites being flown. Titus hardly ate anything because he was too interested in everything going on around him. Aaris was very excited about flying her own kite! I managed to find one in the back of a closet this morning. I have not had much luck with kite flying the last couple of attempts. Anyway, we put ours together and then spent about an hour trying everything imaginable to get that thing to fly. I would have walked away about 20 minutes in if I was on my own, but I had two kids watching me and I just kept thinking about what they would think if I quit mad. Well, we did finally get the kite to stay off the ground for extended periods of time. But, we had to face the fact that our kite was a low flying kite. It just nose dived after a certain height was reached....about head level. :) We took it all in baby steps. I got the kite somewhat working on my own. Then, the kids set on my shoulders while I held the kite. Next, the kids held the kite while I held them. And, finally, Aaris was able to hold it herself. She did great and was so excited that we never gave up and that we finally got it to work. We didn't get home until 4:00 and Titus only got an hour nap (it's usually 3 hours), but we all ended up having a great time. Fun, FREE, family day!

(P.S. In the pictures it doesn't look like many people where there, but really there where thousands and thousands. We started off among them all in the busy kite flying sections, but after running around looking stupid trying to get my non-flying kite to fly, I decided to leave for some place less embarrasing. We ended up in a back corner where it seemed like most of the "kite challenged" people hid themselves.)