We chose west.
We chose west because of parades. Since we don't live in the area, we did not know if these small communities were having parades on the morning of July 4th. If you enter the valley from the north, there's a small town before we get to the town where family lives. The last thing we wanted to do was wait for a parade to end before we could continue.
We thought we were so smart.
Nope.
I forgot if you take the western route, there's not one small town, but two. Didn't even think about parades in those towns. The first town we hit, Fountain Green was lovely. In fact, it almost looked like the town was deserted. A few minutes later we found out why.
From Fountain Green it's a short distance to Moroni and as we rounded the corner to hit the main street, we saw people in the street picking up trash, people on the side of the street picking up chairs and blankets.
Yes. We hit the town only minutes after their patriotic parade ended. We thought, "Great. Parade's over. Now, we just drive through town, then drive straight through to Mt. Pleasant. But, as we cleared Moroni, we noticed cars were backing up heading out of town. I thought that odd. I mean, yes, I'm sure people from one community wanted to check out their neighbor's parade. What I didn't know is the people in the west were about to start their own parade about an hour after the one in Moroni ended and many of the floats and those in the first parade were on their way to the second.
My fear realized. We ended up being behind not one parade, but two.
In the end, it was no big deal. We eventually made it and had a blast enjoying the holiday with family. Next time, we'll know. It's just one of the things we learned about Small Town Utah on Independence Day.
