Mother Nature has been messing with the region a lot recently. Just as the flood waters were beginning to recede, more rain entered the forecast and threatened to put a damper on the Fourth of July celebration presented by the Hastings Golf Club and Vermillion State Bank. Dozens of posts on the local social media community pages highlighted the interest and concern of folks around the event but those concerns were quickly abated with the words “Rain or Shine”. For most of the day Thursday, it looked like rain.
The timing was almost perfect, the rain stopped at 6:55 and the parade started at 7:00. It turned out to be a beautiful night. Nicole Sindelar, owner of Hastings Public House and Hastings Golf Club had more than the parade and fireworks planned for the night. After the parade, folks flocked to the Hastings Golf Club for food, music and fun. Category 5 Band provided the music, and the crew of Hastings Public House provided the fun. They even raffled off “Prime Seating” for the fireworks with all of the money being donated to Hastings Family Service.
The parade was a little smaller than years past with just over 30 entries. Most of the talk that was being picked up about the parade was it was a decent length with many not minding the shorter parade due to the humidity after the rain.
The route of the parade was expected to be the same as last year, but feedback from local officials forced a last-minute change to keep it entirely on 15th Street West. That change caused quite a pileup of onlookers at the intersection of Westview Drive and 15th Street. The start of the parade, where there is the most room for onlookers, had plenty of extra space for people to spread out and as it progressed further toward the end, there were spots where it was five to ten rows of people deep. That was likely due to the weather leading up to the start and the last-minute decisions of folks to join the celebration.
The fireworks show brought to you by Vermillion State Bank kicked off right at 10:00 p.m. and could be seen from all over town. The show was just over 20 minutes long and had a wide variety of fireworks. The rain held off for the show, but the earlier rain and then sun combination did cause some fog to begin in the lower lying areas and the lack of wind did not move the smoke out of the way of the fireworks. The combination of the fog and smoke did make the show look both interesting and neat to see how that helped illuminate the sky with each bang of the fireworks.
Head on over to www.hastingsjournal.news to see the entire set of pictures captured from both the parade and fireworks.