Dancing with a Dragon

Well, it was actually a Chinese lion, but you get the gist.

Rachel, Leah and her two Mini GoodGymers met up with Kathryn at Hermitage Square to help with the setup for the weekend's festival. We started out drawing a giant "yellow brick road" from the entrance to the main performance area with pavement chalk (definitely a job for the smaller ones to save the bigger ones' backs), then cable tied gazebos together, taped banners and tablecloths to tables, unloaded kit from cars, and got lots of bin bags ready.

Once we'd run out of jobs, we headed up to meet the parade at its start point on Edale Road, where we were met by Robert who'd been Parkrunning. We were given the honour of stewarding the front section of the parade, right behind a giant gramophone on top of a car and the Nottingham Chinese Lion Dance team. Not your average Saturday morning!

The parade was huge – much bigger than we had expected – and thankfully we had a pretty easy ride of it with no emergency services vehicles trying to get past, or anyone doing themselves a mischief. Even Leah.