Tampa Bay Festival

I think you'd have to been living under a rock to not hear about this weekend's Tampa Bay Festival at the RayJay stadium grounds. I bet I saw 5-10 signs, bumper stickers, billboards, banners, etc. every day.

I went on Sunday with my daughter, mostly to catch the kid's zone. It was kind of interesting to see kids lining up and almost battling over getting to do games and other activities that aren't that different than what we do pretty regularly at our church. In fact, it was mostly our church volunteers in the kid's zone. There were others there but in the kid's zone I'd guess that 4 out of 5 volunteers were from Van Dyke. Pretty cool to see.

We did get to catch the last Livin It show of the festival. It was pretty cool because I'd gotten to see Steven Baldwin talk about this ministry almost two years ago, and here I was seeing it in action. It's been a long time since I've seen BMX jumps live. I probably haven't seen them since I was on a BMX bike. The motorcross jumps were pretty amazing to see, that close, especially with the wind. Still, the most amazing thing to me was listening to Christian Hosoi talk. Not only is he a (former?) pro skater, but he was able to talk about his descent into drugs and eventual arrest and 5 year prison sentence. The crowd was pretty quiet by the time he was done.

It was getting pretty cold, so I didn't battle the crowd at the main stage but I guess I just missed Tony Dungy. So he really did speak both days, which I guess was sort of up in the air for a while. Everyone was asking if (and when) he was going to speak. He was definately a crowd favorite, so it's great that he came out both days. I'm sure he did a great job.