Grand Haven Coast Guard Festival

I was truly impressed with the love Grand Haven has for the Coast Guard. What started as a picnic in 1924, has grown into a ten-day festival that draws more than 350,000 people, including the nation’s highest-ranking United States Coast Guard dignitaries from Washington, DC. The town is literally known as “Coast Guard City USA”.

Dale and I both agreed that Marines have never been so celebrated by its townspeople. As a matter of fact, normally the locals want us to leave. I don’t understand it. 😉

The festival included a carnival, parade, music events every night, a large market, boat tours, and more. Homes were decorated, downtown was shut off and decorated. It was such a patriotic scene and we thoroughly enjoyed it. In Grand Rapids we are surrounded by a lot of woke noise, but every time we’ve visited other smaller towns, we see a different story. On the last night of the festival, the musical artist was Gary Sinise and his band the Lt. Dans. Unfortunately, tickets sold out almost immediately.

Upon arrival, our first stop was a tour of two Coast Guard ice-breaking vessels. The bigger one, the CGC Mackinaw, in addition to being an icebreaker, also has state-of-the-art systems and multi-mission capabilities including search and rescue. It was interesting to go aboard.

The market was next. It was very large and had a great variety of booths. I would have loved to buy quite a few things, but we didn’t need any of it! I have to say that the cool temperatures made all of our activities even more enjoyable. The only thing we bought was a small bag of kettle corn to get us through the parade, which was next on our activity list.

Prior to going to the market, we had put our little camping chairs along the road to save our space, just like the rest of the town, so we had a pretty good view. It was a very good parade with dignitaries, bands, clowns, the Shriners, policemen, firefighters and such. One of the entries that got me on my feet to clap was a high school band that was made up of home school students. I’ve never seen that. They were wearing their uniforms, whereas most of the other high school bands were in t-shirts. Also, their music was fun and they had bounce in their step. I really enjoyed it. The other entry was a group of correctional officers who marched with as much snap and pop as a Marine Corps platoon. And the guy calling cadence sounded like a Marine. I bet he was active duty at one time.

After the parade we headed toward home, stopping by Chick-fil-A on the way.