Pear Blossomation

For those who are unaware of the significance of Pear Blossom, it really marks the start of Spring in the Rogue Valley.
The day starts with early morning runs/walks and then at 11am, the main parade through Medford's downtown.
For the last 2 years I've been a part of theDove's float, but this year we had started talking at the Naz about whether we could get the band on a float for Pear Blossom. After batting it around, we found that the personnel were available, and thanks to the genius of Joe Bettis and a crew of technical marvels, we found ourselves at a local lock-up on Friday  night, soundchecking for the parade, which would serve as the first real advertising we have done for Saturday nights at Naz.
As you can see from the pictures, the technical marvels had also rigged up a really neat gazebo thing which was chiefly designed to protect from any rain, but which also came in useful as a sun shield, as it turned out. Final touches were added to the float at 7.30am Saturday, just as Pastor Trevor was coming 4th in in the run for his age bracket - and first among Central Point runners in that bracket, so in my book, he's a winner. His sister-in-law came 20th out of around 400 girls, which is probably not a huge surprise to those of us who know her!
By 8.30am, the float was parked up in place in the holding area with a band consisting of keyboards, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums and bass, along with 5 vocalists, complete with our own on-board sound engineer. It wasn't as cold as forecast, but still very brisk, especially for guitar strings etc. so plenty of retuning was needed. We ran through a few songs as we waited for the off, which would be well after 11am as we were right at the back of the parade. By the time we pulled away at around noon, we'd played quite a bit and the conditions were warmer, with some sporadic sun.
As we got under way and started to encounter the people lining the route, the reaction seemed very positive. As far as we were aware, we were possibly the only live band apart from the various marching bands, and people seemed really into the music,  and not just those we saw from our church. A surprising number of people we saw seemed to know the words of the songs we were doing.
The setlist was kept upbeat, with what outside of worship would be called "crowd pleasers". Lincoln Brewster's "Everybody Praise The Lord", "All To You" and "Give Him Praise", New Life Church's "Mighty King Of Love", Chris Tomlin's "Sing Sing Sing", Jesus Culture Redding's "Your Love Never Fails" and Tim Hughes' "Happy Day". I think we probably played some of those songs six or seven times by the time we had finished, so we had the arrangements pretty much down.
Judging by the reactions, I think it was a very successful thing to do, and well worth all the effort. At our 6pm service later, Pastor Grinder reported that 8 or 9 people had come after seeing the band playing in the Pear Blossom.

One final story to report. A guy who was marshaling floats in the holding area came up to us after we'd been running through some songs. He was interested in where the church was and talked about maybe coming to check out a service. His comment was "We're gonna have to pull you out of the parade......cuz you're too AWESOME!!".