Day #1: The Opening Ceremony...

It's always amazing how this day always seems to sneak up on us, isn't it?  It just seems like one day everything is quiet, normal, and boring around Gaylord and then the next thing you know, it takes you a good forty-five minutes to get from one side of town to the other!  In a bigger city this wouldn't be such a big deal, but anyone who's ever been here knows exactly what we're talking about!  "The Strip" is maybe a mile long, if you take the scenic route, but we all know that there'll be no cruisin' the strip this week...

After a quick tour of the area to plan our week (believe it or not, we actually do put a little planning into this stuff), we headed over to the main stage to check out the Alpenfest Queen's Pageant.  Here we watched from afar as a bunch of girls in frilly dresses pranced around on stage doing things.  Due to the wonderful sound system that our fine city conjured up for this event, we can only imagine what they were actually talking about up there.  You'd think that this being the largest event that we see each year, the city would break down and rent a PA that projects past the first three rows.  Maybe they spent their entire budget on goofy hats and costumes for all the city employees to wear this week... (don't worry, pictures will follow!)
 

The first of two big highlights this evening is the Alpenfest Queen's Pageant, where a dozen of the area's young ladies gather to engage in a battle of prestige, talent, beauty and charisma.  This little ceremony goes on for a couple hours, after which the judges cast their votes to the girl with the largest breasts.  Look at them: aren't they beautiful???

The last half of the evening is devoted to freeing us of our troubles for the week, so that we're free to enjoy the rest of the week and spend lots of money at Alpenfest.  This is celebrated by the annual 'Burning of the Boog,' which is theoretically a giant cotton snowman that we fill with paper and torch.  It's supposed to represent winter to the Swiss, or so we've been told.  Anyways, everyone writes their troubles on these pieces of paper and then watches them go up in smoke, thus magically making all of our troubles disappear!  Pretty neat, eh?  That's what we first thought, too...
 

This is a picture of the Boogg.  It's the big, fat, ugly guy, even though that doesn't help too much in this picture. The Boogg is the one in the back, made of paper mache.  That other guy is just some idiot who isn't very considerate toward those around him and thus wandered right into the middle of our picture.  These are the kinds of geniuses we have to deal with around here.  His phone number is (989) 732-4000, so feel free to give him a call some night around three in the morning to pass along the favor...

After choosing a few select troubles of ours to eliminate, we stuffed them into the Boogg and waited, and waited, and waited.  Finally after running into more people that we knew than we'd care to discuss, the crowd gathered around the Boogg and followed it to a nearby parking lot where it would soon meet its fiery demise.  Ever been to a lynching?  This is pretty much the same general concept, only there are little kids running around with flashlights the whole time.  It helps to set the mood.

The Boogg sounds cool, don't it?  What could be more fun than burning a big, fat, ugly looking guy full of paper?  That's what we thought, so Scott and I each grabbed a piece of paper and a marker and wrote down a few things that had been troubling each of us.  Here's what I came up with.

It was truly hard to narrow down all of my troubles to just these, but I figured that they were the most important... By the way, as long as we're on the subject, if you think that you might be able to help with any of my troubles, say numbers one and five specifically, feel free to drop me a line: Scott.Sevener@JustLaugh.Net Come to think of it, if you could even just help with the third one, I'm up for that, too!  I'm flexible like that...

Within seconds this thing was up in smoke, possibly because it was made out of flour and filled with paper.  You'd think with that many troubles all grouped together, it'd take a bit for the spirits to sort everything out, but we'll leave that up to them.  It's still hard to tell at this point if all our troubles have truly been taken care of for the week, but we'll keep you posted!  (Especially if Scott's are lifted!  Expect banners, cake, and balloons for the kids!)
 

Everyone is supposed to write all of their troubles down on a piece of paper and stick it in the Boogg.  It's kinda like stuffing a turkey, but not nearly as messy.  Then they take the Boogg to a parking lot and burn the shit out of it.  Bring the kids!!!

That pretty much wraps up our coverage of the first night here at Alpenfest!  We'll be back tomorrow with more exciting info, as well as a look at some of the vendors that turn our fair city into their own personal pawn shops for the week.  Until tomorrow...