After spending a restless night camping on the outskirts of Cleveland, OH, I woke up to find that my feet had unfortunately been uncovered for part of the night, and the mosquitoes had had a feast on them.  Honestly, I look like I have a disease.  This is the only night that they’ve bothered me at all, however, so I suppose I should grateful for that and just be a bit more diligent with the bug repellent.  But I also woke up to find that the cooling off period was over, and the closing on my house in Australia would occur in about a month, provided that I could return all the paperwork.  Which meant that I needed to find an office supply store to print the documents for me to sign, and then rescan them.  I tell you all of this because the need for a shopping center where I could find both a pharmacy for bug spray, and an office supply store, is the only reason that I ended up in Twinsburg, OH.

As I came into town I saw a sign that said I had arrived just in time for Twins Days!  At first I assumed that the local high school team, probably named the Twinsburg Twins (Go local sports team!  Do the thing, get the points!), was having a rally of some sort, but I was quickly corrected by the man at the office store, who informed me that this was, in fact, the largest gathering of twins, identical and fraternal, foreign and domestic, anywhere in the world.  No kidding.

Okay, well, I had no real plans for the morning, so decided to seize the opportunity to see what that was about.  Now I should confess that I’m the singleton sibling of twin sisters ten years older than me, so I’ve always had a mild case of twin envy.  I remember in particular that in their teens they were two tall, statuesque, brilliant, and talented young women, with long blonde and brunette hair, and the added interest of being twins, while I was a scrawny eight year old tomboy, with red hair, too many freckles, and scabs on my knees, kind of tagging along behind.  I couldn’t help but feel that having a twin would have at least upped my game a bit.

But getting back to Twins Days, I arrived in time to catch the end of the parade.  There was a parade!  There was apparently a marching band from the high school leading it off, and all of the twins marched in pairs.  The theme for the day seemed to be “Twins are out of this world!,” so there were a lot of space themed things happening.  These two dressed up as Marvin the Martian.

And these boys were adorable as Buzz Lightyears — although I noted that they had a younger single sister walking along behind them looking distinctly unimpressed.

The clowns were twins, as were the Tardises (Tardi??).

There were twins in the crowd watching as well.

Although some young spectators were just in it for the candy…

Like any small town parade there was a fair bit of improvisation, and I have to admit that I was impressed with prize bin from Toy Story — if you look closely, “the claw” is a bucket with three crutches attached to it, and painted silver!

Some of it was just, quite frankly, confusing.  And when they chucked the town snow plows in there as well, it seemed like everyone was just looking for a reason to march.  But hey, there were two of them, so why not?

I’ll be honest, I found myself saying “Sure, why not?” a lot during the time I was there, as much of it seemed to defy logic, or to just be pretty darn random.  But really, logic is over-rated in a situation like this, isn’t it?  The drivers and marchers were waving, the kids were waving back, the adults were laughing, it was a beautiful summer’s day, and really I think that any excuse to gather and smile at each other for a while would have done just as well.  Down the road at the middle school they had carnival rides, funnel cakes, games, and all the usual festival things.  Whenever I asked, people were happy to give me a photo op (the woman with the crown on the left is named Kat).

And because it’s the US, there were even twin cars (these Fords weren’t identical, but others seemed to be).

These guys insisted on having their picture taken, although what they were trying to be, why they posed like this, why they had six dogs, or even if they were twins, wasn’t really clear!

I’ll counter that with this handsome pair of Captain Americas, who brought up the end of the parade.

So with funnel cake in hand I walked back to my car, remembered my signed documents but forgot the bug spray, and got back on the road.  It was a great way to spend the day.  Was it the largest gathering of twins in the world?  Well, I would have thought there would be a lot more if it was truly the largest…. but you know… Sure, why not?!?