I had a last-minute invitation this week to participate in the Middleburg, VA Christmas Parade. I have heard good things about this event from friends in the Jaguar and the Triumph clubs, so I joined in. It's a huge event - there were thousands of people lining maybe 8 blocks of downtown. The parade is in segments, with several separate parades all morning and early afternoon. Various segments of the parade has small floats, bagpipers, equestrians and horse-drawn carriages. There are breaks in between each event. I got to our staging area around 1:00PM, and did some minor 'decoration' of the Seven. The cars - probably hundreds of us - were called to start around 2:00PM. We were staged on a side road for about 10 minutes, and then drove very slowly down the main street, through crowds behind barriers on each side. The parade itself lasted maybe 15 minutes for our group. We were the first car group - I'm sure the whole automobile portion of the parade was at least an hour. I was behind a drag-racing-prepped Camaro, complete with massive tires and a blower. His car died two blocks before the end of the parade. Luckily, the route was downhill from there, and some volunteers pushed him though the end of the parade route.

--Bob Collum