Cleveland Cavaliers Championship Parade

Two things I need to start with:

I don’t normally watch high-stakes sporting events. Playoffs are almost entirely off the table. I can’t handle the stress and anxiety. My palms sweat, I hide beneath pillows or under blankets. I’m basically a hot mess. So I don’t watch these types of games.
I don’t normally take my kids on ridiculous adventures that I know are hopeless or where there will be huge crowds of people. I’m the kind of person who likes to be at Target at 9 am to intentionally avoid the crowds.

Now that you know my parenting and sporting style, let’s move on.

As you know from Tuesday’s post, I stayed up far too late watching the Cleveland Cavaliers take the title on Sunday evening. It was a real nail-biter of a game. I was legit hiding in my zippy. My husband basically guilted me into watching the game with him. How could I not? It was game 7 PLUS it was Father’s Day. I felt bad making him watch solo. I’m so grateful I sat down with him to watch, though. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.

Fast forward to Tuesday and I had the brilliant idea to take the kids to the championship parade on Wednesday honoring the Cleveland Cavaliers. How bad could it be, right? There were only going to be about 800,000 people packing the streets of downtown and I figured if we left early enough we would beat the rush. We made a plan to head downtown around 7:45 am thinking that would be plenty of time to get down and situated.

Wednesday morning arrived. We heard reports of the trains being full and with several hours of waiting time to get on. We drove instead. There was very little traffic and we found a parking spot pretty close to the parade route. Phew!

We were in great spirits, got to the parade route and… waited. Having arrived around 8:45 am, we had two hours to wait until the parade even started. Through the entire waiting period, the kids were champs. They played, danced, had a snack, complained a bit, but overall did really, really well.

11:00 am came and went. No parade. 11:45 am came and went. No parade. And not only that, but there was no parade in sight blocks away from us. By this time, the kids were getting cranky, I was getting cranky, and although he won’t admit it publicly, my husband was getting cranky, too. Some people were saying (falsely) that there were so many people in the streets they were going to cancel the parade.

We knew that wasn’t true, but we were reaching our “good behavior” limits from our kids. We sadly decided to head home at 12:45 pm — a full four hours after we had arrived. In kidspeak, that equates to eternity!

As it turns out, the parade was nowhere near where we were standing when we left. Only when we were about 20 minutes heading in the opposite direction did the OSU marching band round the corner onto the street we were waiting on. It also turns out that some 1.3 million people descended on CLE for this event to get a peek at the Cleveland Cavaliers and witness history in the making. Just incredible.

So yes, we went downtown for the parade and didn’t see it. We (the grown ups) are a little disappointed, but we’re grateful we were at least able to take part in the festivities for the few hours we could. It was an experience we won’t soon forget and we plan on being there next year when the Cavs win again.

GO CAVS!