SEQUIM — Dogs in T-shirts. Old-time cars from the 1920s.
Marching bands from high schools and middle schools around northwest Washington.
Fancy floats that glimmered in the on-again, off-again sunshine, and marchers strutting their stuff.
It was another year for Sequim’s annual Irrigation Festival Grand Parade, and Saturday’s event — spanning a mile down the city’s main drag and lasting about two and a half hours — drew its typical enthusiastic crowd.
“I used to march in this when I was little,” said Casey Quaadman of Gold Bar, who grew up in Sequim and made her way Saturday to the parade in conjunction with a visit with her 10-year-old daughter, Ashlee Farnam.
The two bought beach chairs at Big Lots in Sequim and lined up a good hour before the parade’s noon start time, just as hundreds of parade entrants were perched on side streets in anticipation of their turn to start marching.
For Danielle Kaminski, the Irrigation Festival parade is old hat.
Danielle, 11, lives in Chimacum but visits her father, John Southard, every other weekend.
Southard said he has brought Danielle to the parade since she was a baby.
Now a middle-schooler, she’s not a spectator anymore, joining her dad and other volunteers in a Clallam County Search and Rescue Team rig.
The parade’s most-watched float, carrying the 2004 Irrigation Festival Royalty Court, sailed down Washington Street with a queen and four princesses in formal gowns.
Queen Katie Gammill and Princesses Chelsea Beus, Shaina Smith and Ashlee Gustason waved to the eager crowd on their butterfly-themed float adorned in shiny purple fringe tassels.