Halloween in August!

Our campground, Brennan Beach RV Resort, in Pulaski, New York, organizes a "Halloween in August" celebration the weekend before Labor Day.  This gives families with children returning to school before Labor Day a chance to have a lot of fun on a camping vacation.  It's also a great excuse for children - and adults - to party!

On Saturday, August 23, we started to see the Halloween decorations popping up everywhere. Owners of trailers were getting their rigs decorated in anticipation of the trailer decoration contest. We saw lots of cute decorations:

This year, the theme was space, and one trailer owner even constructed a scale model of the Space Shuttle with its own wooden gantry:

Early in the afternoon, after the trailer decoration contest, the campground witnessed a parade of decorated golf carts.  In campgrounds such as this, many campers use golf carts to wheel around. We usually prefer using our legs and feet, but generally we have less weight to carry around than many trailer campers.  Here, one neighborhood is readying its golf carts for the parade:

The best themed golf cart we saw was decorated as the USS Enterprise (the Star Trek version, not the Naval version):

Not to be satisfied with trailer decoration and golf cart parades, later in the afternoon the campground hosted a Halloween costume contest.  Children of all ages flocked to the community center to have their costumes judged by age category.  One of our favorites was the Cat in the Hat, with his (actually, her) friends, Thing 1 and Thing 2:

Of course, our VERY MOST FAVORITE were these two Minions from "Despicable Me," accompanied by their friend Tinkerbell.  We were sure we heard them singing "Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba-Ba-Na-Na...Po-tay-tohhhh!" as they posed for our photo.  We know that Sir William would highly approve of those little Halloweeners' costumes!

Right after the costume contest, the little Halloweeners were off, around the campground, Trick-or-Treating to see how many treats they could entice from various campers.  Since this campground hosts over 1,400 (!) trailers and other RV'ers, you can imagine that the kids loaded their bags with treats very quickly!

We did our part.  We had our big bowl of candy, our decorations, and such.  We played spooky Halloween music.  Kathy wore a mask.  Even Baxter got into the act and impersonated a spooky black cat:

By 7:00 pm, we and the kids were exhausted.  They went their way.  We closed up candy shop.  Then, after a quick dinner, we sauntered over to the community center for a 2 hour concert by the "Horn Dogs," a local band featuring horns a la the rock band "Chicago."  They rocked the campground with classics from the 60's, 70's, 80's and later, including a couple songs by Adele. Here the crowd rocks to the band's version of the Rolling Stones' "I Can't Get No Satisfaction":

Just in case you think we weren't enjoying ourselves, we decided to document our participation:

We noticed that most of the perhaps 5,000 (yes, 5000!) attendees at the concert seemed at least a little bit happy.  Some seemed somewhat inebriated.  A few were possibly stumbling.  They were all happy, and in some cases, too happy.  We thought, "Boy, there are going to be some miserable people in the campground tomorrow morning."

Sure enough, the campground stayed VERY quiet until maybe 10:00 am.  We walked up and down the camp roads around 8:30 and saw evidence everywhere of dead dogs waiting to be attended to:

Halloween can be an ugly thing.