You may have read the title to this post and thought, “What the what?!? How many years is an ‘aqua’?” But, you see, Minnesota is a magical land where the rules of Latin roots and prefixes don’t apply! The Aquatennial Festival is a celebration of water that includes milk carton boat races, sand castle competitions, fireworks, fun runs, and the same people you usually see yelling at their toddlers at Walmart this time yelling at them while they eat snow cones. It’s a good time!
I attended the milk carton boat races, in which participants not only construct boats that can hold four people out of real milk cartons, they also decorate their boats to look like something cool and then race them. Below, and from left to right, you will see a mouse (its long tail slowed it down, plus I think it had extra people in it), a phoenix (which some people chided as not looking much like a bird at all, but which I thought it was super cool and super fantasy-style creative), the house from the movie UP (which is sort of hard to make out here, but which looks quite cool from the photo at the Aquatennial Festival home page), and (taking the lead by a long shot) either an alligator or a crocodile. Also, you will notice a canoe, between the mouse and the phoenix, who is presumably there to prevent drowning either intentional or un-.
They also have a sand “castle” building competition, by which they actually mean a sand sculpture building competition. We left before we saw who won. Please enjoy these photos of my favorite sand sculptures:
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- Jaba the Hut
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- A Ziggurat. I especially like the greenery.
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- A dinosaur bone excavation site
Radically Amazed 