It’s about time we were able to do something in this town worth taking photos of again… as a town famous for its Events, Covid really kicked the crap out of Vankleek Hill — Beau’s Oktoberfest, the Festival of Flavours, the Vankleek Hill Fair, the Horse & Buggy Parade, even the Historical Society’s Galas, not to mention the ‘Wee Irish Parade’, the Christmas Home Tour, Pond Rocket Hockey Tournament, the May Show Arts Festival, and PorchFest were all cancelled twice over due to the Pandemic.

Events like these normally bring thousands of people to our little village, and now it’s quite possible some of those Events are gone for good. Beau’s Brewery still hasn’t decided if it’ll be possible for them to continue their wildly popular Oktoberfest. Excellent Events, the local group which puts together most of our smaller Events, aren’t sure their ‘Festival of Flavours’ — which brings in 8,000 people for a one-day foodfest, will be back. Even this years Santa Parade was going to be cancelled until the municipality finally stepped in.

So far this Festival Season has been slower than ‘The Before Times’, but the Trash & Treasure brought a few thousand people here, and both the Truck & Tractor Pull, and PorchFest were successes. And Excellent Events did try their best to get our annual Festival Season back on track with the 2022 Horse & Buggy Parade… due to a screw up at the Municipal level, however, there were no police cars available to block traffic for the Event. So at the last second it was moved to the Fair Grounds, which meant it was limited to a crowd of a couple hundred die-hard horse fanatics. But the Organizers were happy.

…this was the first Event I’ve shot since the 2019 Historical Society Gala, and it felt good to get out. I was planning on shooting purely as something to get this Blog going again, but the publisher / owner of the local paper was there and asked if I’d like to get paid for my photos… so that was nice.

In a collage of about eight photos, they only used one of mine, and two months later I still haven’t been paid, but it really was great to be out and doing something other than wondering if the cashier was one of the Infected.

…anyway, click on an image to get the image carousel going.