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Duvall, WA ~ Overrun by giraffes, periodically an island, the greatest little city this side of the Atlantic

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Duvall Days – The Days of Duvall

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Duvall Days

Every year. First weekend in June. Duvall has its day…s. Duvall Days is next weekend! Our city celebrates its awesomeness. So, if you plan to miss it, be warned. You will live a life filled with regret and die alone.

Some years Duvall Days blows our minds and other years it’s kind of meh. However, even when it’s meh, it’s kind of amazing. We love Duvall Days. And this year looks like the best one we’ve had in many years, maybe ever.

Of course tractors will drive and horses will dance down Main Street. I pray Kathy Lambert notepads will be distributed because my supply is running low. Vendors will be all along the parade route again like last year. But, there are also a few new and exciting things happening.

Here’s a brief look at what’s in store Saturday:

Arts, crafts, and food vendors will set up shop along main street, in the Police Department parking lot, and in McCormick Park.

A mechanical bull will be bucking people off in the Duvall Tavern parking lot from 9am-4pm.

The Big Rock Car Show will be set up in the Safeway parking lot from 9am-4pm. (Stock up on groceries by Friday night because this gets to be crazy town. Fun, crazy town.)

Scavenger hunt, fun/kid/family zones (I think that’s code for bouncy houses and probably water fun), beer gardens.

Parade starts at 10:30 along Main Street.

KCLS will have a library van in the upper area of McCormick park so you can check out library books from a van… down by the river.

There will be a rock climbing wall, zip line, bubble soccer, laser tag, basketball tournament, and a frog jump contest.

You can take a nap at Duvall Co-op Prechool or get your hands duty at the petting zoo.

A photo booth will be set up near the depot building.

You can purchase cow pie bingo tickets on Saturday and watch the live streaming pie drop on Sunday from the comfort of your own home. Running of the Balls down Stewart Street sounds like a blast.

Face painting and tattoos will be administered in the Windermere parking lot. They don’t specify what kind of tattoos will be given.

Blitz, the Seahawks mascot, will make an appearance.

The historic Dougherty Farmstead will be open for tours and Cherry valley Winery will have an art show and wine tasting. Shuttles will be provided.

There will be tons of musical and dance performances and at 10 PM they will detonate things in McCormick park. #fireworks

You can even order food in the evening from local restaurants and have it delivered to you wherever you’re hanging out.

On Sunday:

Race in the REF 5K, 10K, or Kids’ Obstacle race.

Carb load with fire fighters at the pancake breakfast.

Watch the cows make pies on a giant bingo card. Or tour Cherry Valley Dairy and watch the cows make pies there.

There’s tons to do, most of it free. The weather is looking to be perfect. I can’t wait! Check out DuvallDays.org for more details.

March of the Vegetables

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I had to go. How could I not? You had me at “people dressed up as vegetables.” You had me. At. “People dressed up as vegetables.”

If you ask anyone who knows me well, they will tell you that my single favorite exhibitor in any valley parade for the last ten years was a man dressed up as a stalk of corn at the Carnation 4th of July Parade. I became obsessed with seeing him again. Obsessed.

And last year’s Duvall Days heralded the first human corn in several years. It cheered my heart.

So, when I heard about March of the Vegetables, I was stoked. It’s a parade focused on art and agriculture and community, celebrating creativity and the return of the growing season for local farms and gardeners.

I’ve been following news and announcements for the past couple of months leading up to Saturday’s March of the Vegetables. I knew people were making art. I knew people were planning to march. I had no idea there would be a band of musical vegetables playing “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.”

That was just icing.

Over a hundred people in handcrafted costumes marched down 1st Avenue smiling, waving, cheering, showing off their art and celebrating their favorite vegetables.

Some costumes were cute.

Others beautiful.

They were all creative.

One woman handed out hand-colored packets of beet seeds she’d saved from her own garden. Could these be cuter? No. The answer is no.

And I love that we’re glorifying growth and community and nutritious foods. It was seriously magical and odd and endearing in a way only Duvall could pull off.

I hope they do it again next year. I may be forced to join in on the fun.

Duvall Giraffes

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Newcomers to Duvall frequently ask, “What’s the deal with the giraffes?”

They are everywhere. On Facebook. In conversation. At the Christmas celebration. On bumper stickers. On T-shirts. Giraffes are a Thing in the City of Duvall.

Should they be a Thing? It’s debatable. When I recently polled the Duvall Community Discussion Board for words to include in a glossary of Duvall-related terms, reactions were mixed.

Several people called for the inclusion of giraffes in the glossary. Others openly mocked the Duvall Giraffe hype, calling it stupid and blaming its existence on “transplants”. Transplants vs. Old Timers remains a fertile field of debate that I will explore in a later post. From what I can tell, you need to have lived in the valley for at least 93 years before people stop gently ribbing you about being an outsider. I will keep you informed.

I’ve lived here for 11 years. So, in Duvall Old Timer culture, I’m basically an annoying cousin camped out on the city’s couch because I ran out of gas on my way to Bothell. They’re not sure how long I’ll be here and they certainly wouldn’t call the arrangement permanent. So, what do I know about Duvall?

Honestly, not that much. However, I moved here before the giraffes so I believe I have a handle on the basic story behind their popularity.

And it’s a story that doesn’t even take place in Duvall.

To tell this story, we’re going to need to travel into unincorporated King County. Hold on to your tractors, Old Timers. It’s a bumpy ride.

In early 2012 King County announced a massive project to create a wildlife bridge across Novelty Hill Road in the Redmond Ridge area. The area experienced frequent animal-vehicle collisions and the bridge would attempt to reduce those by re-routing animals over the road, rather than across it.

Remember the Wolves-Only Roadway from The West Wing? It was like that.

Reactions to this project were decidedly mixed and people passionately spoke out either for or against the overpass. King County held meetings, attended by members of Duvall and other communities, and then decided to go ahead with what they planned to do in the first place. The project was paid for with federal grants totaling nearly six million dollars.

Drama on the Discussion Board

In a shocking turn of events, conversations got heated on the Duvall Community Discussion Board. Gasp. Before long, sarcasm was employed, and eventually it led to a crap-storm of memes. What were the memes about?

**The original giraffe/bridge photoshop creation came from Jeremiah Judd, according to the Duvall Historical Society. You can view the image at that link. More information can also be found here. Thanks, Bairavi!**

You see, human people were upset that King County was spending so much money on a project to build Animal Roads, when the People Roads in and out of Duvall left so much to be desired. Why should we spend millions of dollars to improve the commute of the deer and the bears and the freakin’ giraffes when my human commute sucks river rocks?

The counter to that was, of course, we are improving People Roads by stopping all the animals from throwing themselves in front of your cars and causing accidents.

As people joked about the need to build the bridge to protect ALL the creatures of the earth, the image of giraffes crossing the bridge along with local species captured the imaginations of the citizens of Duvall.

And the meme storm began.

Even the Duvall Police Department got in on the fun. (They generally bring the fun, so it’s not that big of a surprise.) You can always count on the Duvall Police Department to have a quality photoshopped giraffe picture ready to deploy on Facebook.

Giraffe bumper stickers, signs, and t-shirts began popping up around town. And as each year goes by, giraffes become more and more of an integral part of our community. Love them or hate them, they’re here to stay.

At the Riverview Education Foundation auction last weekend, they held a massive rock-paper-scissors competition with all the attendees. It was epic. It was hard fought. It was probably a game invented by a transplant. The prize was a Duvall Giraffe.

A few fun facts:

Three years ago, Jeremiah Judd started a petition to make the giraffe the official mascot of our fair city. He delivered the petition to the city but, as far as I can tell, no official action was ever taken.

Giraffes have been in the Duvall public consciousness for a while now. The first mention I find of giraffes and Duvall is at a city council meeting in 2010, when giraffes were given to staff and city council members as a thank-you gift for “sticking their necks out” working on the Main Street Reconstruction Project.

Whenever we talk about giraffes, I think about this SNL sketch.

A band called Giraffe Tongue Orchestra has a lead singer named William Duvall. You can learn all about them when you Bing “Duvall Giraffes”.

Follow InTheDuv on Facebook or sign up for email updates. I’ll update you on some of the events and activities happening in Duvall and get to the bottom of a few of our city’s little mysteries.

As always, if you find any inaccuracies in this post, please tell me in the comments. I love learning about our town.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. This means, I may receive a small commission if you choose to purchase something from a link I post. Don’t worry, it costs you nothing. Thank you for supporting my website!

A Hawaiian Vacation in Duvall

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I was at a basketball game in Bothell last weekend when an old college roommate called me out of the blue. She and a friend were headed from Salt Lake City to Hawaii with standby tickets for the long weekend. But they’d gotten stuck in Seattle and couldn’t get a flight out to the islands.

So, she asked if they could come stay with us instead. Duvall is almost like Hawaii, right?

While they drove their rental car from the airport, we stopped by a party store in Woodinville and picked up some leis and Hawaiian décor items. We pumped the ukulele tunes and did our best to give them a little piece of the islands right here in The Duv.

How do you have a Hawaiian vacation in Duvall? I’m glad you asked.

If the weather is sunny, you head down to The River, aka the sandy beach in McCormick Park, dip your toes in the sand and feel the gentle breeze on your face. To maintain the tropical illusion, don’t ever EVER touch the frigid water.

After the beach, head up to C.C.’s for some ice cream.

The weather was cold and wet last weekend so we just went straight for the treats. One of our guests has a severe gluten allergy, so she asked the ladies at C.C.’s to open a new container of ice cream from the back and use a fresh scoop that hadn’t come into contact with any cones.

They graciously agreed and even sold us a gluten-free cookie to go with our Maui Waui.

The staff at C.C.’s are always awesome and accommodating and we love their ice cream. Remember late last fall when the weather prognosticators predicted the biggest wind storm in 100 years, so CCs gave everyone in Duvall free ice cream, “in case the power went out and everything melted”? And then the wind blew for ten seconds and the sun came out? And we felt okay about the lack of storm excitement because we were so full of free ice cream? Good times.

We shopped along Main Street and when one friend said, “What I really wanted to do in Hawaii was stand under a waterfall,” we gave her a waterfall. A good one. Just a few miles up the valley. She did not stand under it. Because of death.

If the weather had been better, we could have hiked up to Cherry Creek Falls.

Eventually we made our way by bridge over to the “big island” for some pineapple, pulled pork, and flying fish.

Not Hawaii. But, not bad.

How would you create a faux-Hawaiian vacation in Duvall?

Dead Animal O’Clock

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I’m in the process of copying over posts from my personal blogs that share a little of our small town Duvall charm. They were all originally published on either DropsofAwesome.com or DaringYoungMom.com. This is one of those posts. It’s about wildlife in town.

I have a thing about dead animals. They make me cry.

When I’m driving down the road and I see a deer carcass or a dead bird smashed to the asphalt, its wing flapping in the wind, I gasp and tears well up. I hate to see animals hurt or killed.

It’s not like I’m a huge animal lover. I am not a cat lady and as I’ve been working on the edits for the third Drops of Awesome book this week, my editor needed to point out that I hadn’t included any questions about pets in a book that asks questions to help the user write her autobiography. It just didn’t occur to me.

But I can’t stand the thought of a dead animal.

Even though I passionately hate the mice who sneak into our garage, it is gut-wrenching to me to dispose of their bodies from the traps. I fall apart.

So, today when I saw a large squirrel dead but still perfectly formed lying in the middle of the road next to Wanda’s bus stop, I lost it a little. It. Was lost. My friend Stephanie and I had just returned from a bike ride and we had no kids with us. I knew that as soon as they got home on the bus, they’d see the poor squirrel and I wanted to spare them that trauma. Even worse, what if a truck drove by and smashed it to pieces and we had to walk by it’s caked-on guts every day for the next six months? I couldn’t bear it.

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I told Stephanie I’d dispose of it if she’d provide the shovel and moral support.

Then, just as I was approaching the beast, she suggested that maybe he was just stunned and as soon as I touched him he might jump up and run toward me.

This was not helpful.

We decided on a two-part approach. First I would poke said beastie with the tip of the shovel. If he made no movement, I would proceed to phase 2, wherein I would push him with the shovel across the road and into the drainage ditch for the coyotes to mange.

She started recording.

There was something about the soft feeling of the shovel touching the squirrel’s belly that sent a shiver through my whole body. It wasn’t pretty. I asked her to stop recording.

But she started again.

And caught my finest hour in pixels.

Because that’s how heroes DO!

I thought it was over.

The kids hopped off the bus and I headed home and retired to the solace of my favorite chair in the corner by my favorite window, working on work and watching Wanda and her friend as they played outside.

When what should fly past my ear but a giant bug. No. Not a bug. A bird. A freaking bird was inside my living room.

It landed on the window sill a few inches from me, flapping it’s wings frantically and slamming into the window over and over again.

I screamed and dropped my water bottle on the floor, wetness spilling everywhere. The bird also started spreading “wetness” all over my window sill. Bird poop. In my living room.

I called Dan for moral support but he was in a meeting. I took some semi-hysterical video tracking the bird.

“Girls,” I yelled outside, “You left the door open and now there’s a bird in the house.”

I heard my neighbor laugh from her house next door.

“Do you need my help?” she asked.

“YES!”

“Seriously? Okay. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

While I was waiting for her, I closed all the blinds in the house except the ones on the window where the bird was thrashing and opened the front door to entice him out. I grabbed a broom and started shooing the bird toward the screened-in part of the window, thinking if he was near the screen, I could push it out and let him free.

I can’t adequately describe the feeling of adrenaline that was coursing through my body as I worked to get this crazy bird out of my house, a bird who moved sporadically, frequently startling me, and who I knew could fly up in my face at any moment, freaking me out and very likely pecking the flesh from my eyes in a Hitchcockian display of terror.

It’s like that feeling you get when you’re poking a dead squirrel in the middle of the road with your shovel, knowing he could jump up, run along the handle of your shovel and start climbing up and down your face while you scream and flail around like a psychobot.

After I moved the bird where I wanted him, I put down the broom so I could have two hands free to remove the screen. As I did this, he dropped out of sight behind my long, dark curtains. I quickly closed those curtains as well, those curtains which hang in an area behind the end table, an area that has become the dumping ground for my church bag, the kids’ piano books, and a bunch of other stuff. Arg.

With the blinds all shut, the living room had grown dim.

The bird was in the mess. In the dark. And he’d gone silent.

No more flapping.

No more pecking.

Silence.

Did he die of fright and fall into my church bag to fester? My neighbor had arrived by this point and she helped me pull items one by one out of my bag, looking for a dead bird.

Nothing.

In the dim light we moved the chair. The end table. The piano.

Nothing.

Ever.

We never found the bird.

I see the writing on the wall. At some point in the next couple of weeks, I will move a cushion or a piano book and BAM! Dead rotting creepy bird carcass!! It’s an exciting game we’re playing here.

My neighbor asked if there was ever really a bird or if I was possibly losing my mind. After SquirrelGate 2016 earlier this morning, I almost doubted myself.

“But no,” I told her, “I have video proof of the bird.”

Then I showed her this.

A minute of me hysterically trying to creep up on a bird that never quite makes it into the video.

Good proof, right?

She looks at me.

“It must be on the other video.”

And here it is.

So the bird is real. And the squirrel is real. And the terror is real. I wanted to find the bird so badly at first, but I’m at a point where I don’t so much want to find it now. Ever.

They say these things happen in threes. I don’t think that’s possible. Because if I have another run-in with a helpless and/or deceased animal today, I will perish as well. And then there will be four dead animals.

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