THE VANGUARD
NovaNewsNow.com
The third annual Festival acadien international de Par-en-Bas heads wraps up this weekend with the official closing Saturday evening, July 24, in Wedgeport.
Indeed, Wedgeport has been the place to be for most festival happenings during the final five or six days of the 2010 Par-en-Bas festival.
This includes a series of daily lectures, a Friday morning business breakfast, along with a Saturday yard sale, beginning at 9 a.m. and cook-off starting at 11 a.m. – all of these taking place at the Wedgeport tuna museum.
Saturday’s lineup includes a quilt and art exposition at Saint Michael’s Church and a sidewalk chalk event at 1:30 p.m. on the church sidewalk. Later in the day it’s the festival’s closing concert with Lennie Gallant, Les Étoiles and Fierté d’l’Acadie.
The concert takes place in the Wedgeport school gym and is scheduled for 7:30 p.m., with doors opening at 6:30. (Food – Cajun and Acadian – will be for sale in the school cafeteria, starting at 4 p.m., according to the festival schedule.)
The festival is to end outdoors with a fireworks display.
While Wedgeport is the main place to be for festival activities during the last week, it is not the only community with festival happenings, given that West Pubnico was the setting for various activities scheduled for Sunday, July 18, including a children’s parade, musical entertainment and more.
Music was on tap for later in the day on July 18 in the form of a concert in Amirault’s Hill featuring la Chorale acadienne du sud-ouest, with guest Chantensemble and Paul Saulnier at the piano.
The 2010 Par-en-Bas festival’s last week also included a cribbage tournament at the Club acadien hall in Ste-Anne-du-Ruisseau, an event held in memory of George Clements.
Like the previous two years, this year’s festival featured plenty of music, including an opening-night show at Le Village historique in West Pubnico.
The first happening on this year’s schedule, however, was in Amirault’s Hill, where, on the morning of July 10, a group of area residents got together, as they do annually, to build a haystack.
Introduced in 2008, the Par-en-Bas festival brought together a wide range of activities that previously had been held as part of smaller festivals in Ste-Anne-du-Ruisseau, West Pubnico, Wedgeport and Amirault’s Hill.
