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Okay. When I left off, it was Saturday morning and Georg, Alix and I had joined the rest of the art car drivers in front of the American Visionary Art Museum. The plan was to gather at the museum, then caravan over to the parade site across town. Then we'd have a few more minutes to regroup before the actual parade.

There was a fair crowd there, so I went ahead and turned on the bubble machine. People seemed to really get a kick out of it so I left it running for a while. This was a big mistake! Even bigger mistake was running it off the battery rather than letting the engine run. I thought it would be bad for the engine to idle in all that heat, but I wasn't thinking about the power drain.

The bubble machine is sold to DJs, intended to be used in clubs. It's got a 3 pronged plug for a wall outlet. I run it off an AC inverter, which is basically a box that plugs into the cigarette lighter and converts the car's DC electricity to AC. The box has two outlets, into one of which I plug the bubble machine. (Actually if you want to get technical about it, I plug an orange extension cord into the inverter because the bubble machine's cord isn't quite long enough. But anyway.) Run the cord out the sunroof and use magnets to attach the bubble machine to the roof.

About fifteen minutes before the caravan was supposed to get moving, I was standing behind my car taking pictures of a little boy playing in the bubbles. Suddenly the bubble machine stopped running. I thought it had broken and I was really ticked off, to have gone to all that effort, finding the bubble machine, beading it, attaching the magnets, only to have it break down right before its debut.

I tried switching it on and off, nothing. Got into the car to check the connections, and noticed that the inverter was beeping loudly and flashing a red light. Didn't know what that meant. (I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes.) Georg suggested, "why don't you try running the engine and see if it works that way?" Good idea, I thought, turned the key and discovered that although the lights on the dash all worked, the car wouldn't start. That's when I realized that I had drained the battery.

Ack! As I'm sure you can imagine, general panic ensued. I spent a few minutes running around trying -- and failing -- to find a volunteer. The volunteers in Houston all wore yellow T-shirts for easy identification. But the folks in Baltimore didn't have a costume or badge or anything that I could see. So I ended up running up to anyone carrying a clipboard saying "Are you a volunteer?" "Are you a volunteer?"

Theresa noticed my distress and asked me what was wrong. I told her I needed a jump start, and fast! Her car was pretty far from mine, but she did have jumper cables. (I did not. My previous car, Little Pig Boy, broke down all the time. In the back I always carried a crate full of emergency supplies like jumper cables, lug wrench, electrical tape, hose clamps, brake fluid, etc. But Undersea Mah Jongg never breaks down, so I've gotten really slack about the emergency supplies.)

Cables in hand, I spotted the driver of the heaven and hell car, which was parked next to mine, sitting on the grass with his dog. He kindly agreed to give me a jump. Unfortunately his battery was on the far side of his car, too far for the way we were parked. So he had to pull out and turn around to face my car. We moved the handy car's tarp out of the way, and the crowd was thin enough that he had no trouble pulling around.

All I can say is, whew! What could have been a major disaster was easily resolved. My car started right up, we gave Theresa back her cables, and then I just had to sit in the car letting it idle until it was time to go. I still felt really stupid about blithely running the bubble machine off the battery for so long, but at least I wasn't going to miss the parade because of it!

Finally the moment of truth: the cars to the right of us started pulling out for the caravan. We could see them heading down the street on the other side of the museum. Meanwhile some folks had pulled out a truck with a flatbed trailer and were loading Fifi, the giant pink poodle bicycle, onto the trailer. When it came to be our turn, we were blocked behind Fifi's truck and couldn't get out!

The look on the volunteer's face was priceless. He was waving cars forward one at a time. When he got to us, he pointed at our car, pointed at Fifi, shrugged helplessly, and walked off.

No big deal though; we simply waited until Fifi was ready to roll, then pulled out behind her. We were essentially a second caravan as the first group had gone on without us while we waited the few minutes for Fifi to be loaded and strapped down. (The police escort went with the first group, which gave me some concern at first, but turned out to be no problem.)

Fifi was loaded backwards on the trailer, which meant that we got to stare at a giant pink poodle head the whole way. It was hilarious! I have no idea how large Baltimore is, but we drove for at least a half hour and it felt like we were going all over town. Every time we fell behind and had to catch up, Georg would yell "Follow that poodle!"

We left the bubble machine on the whole way there, though I felt some concern about bubble-bombing the car behind us, which was the Kinder Car. Every time they got close I could see the bubbles going all over their car, and I'm sure their windshield was covered with soap. As was the rear window of my car! The magnets I had rigged up to attach the bubble machine to the car were a bit loose, allowing for a little bounce, and every time we went over a bump I could see bubble juice spilling out of the machine and dripping down the rear window.

However, we did have fun bubbling cars that passed by. At once point a VW Cabrio jumped into our caravan, right in front of us. At a light I said "Let's bubble bomb them!" and to our glee, the wind changed just at that moment and bubbles started flying right at them! They pulled out of our lane immediately, ha!

Finally we arrived at the parade line-up. I jumped out of the car and ran back to the car behind us, to ask if our bubbles had bothered her. I wasn't about to turn them off during the parade, so if it had bothered her I would have asked her to leave a good distance between us, that way the bubbles wouldn't get on her car. But to my relief, she said she loved them. That's why she was following us so close, to get more of our bubbles.

There were three rows of cars lined up and we were in the left. I have to admit it was a bit chaotic compared to Houston and the Chapel Hill Christmas parade (my only other parade experiences). The cars were really close together and there were people everywhere, spectators and drivers all over the place.

We weren't sure how long we would be waiting there so none of us strayed from the car. We did notice that the flamingo car had lit four tiki torches, which was very cool. Georg took a picture but I don't think it came out unfortunately.

They made us park some distance back so there would be room to unload Fifi. Once they had her unloaded, we pulled up to close the gap. Unfortunately, when they unloaded Fifi they also turned her around. Which makes perfect sense, of course she would face forward while she's being driven. Only it meant that, instead of staring at a giant pink poodle head, we were now staring at a giant pink poodle behind.

Finally the parade started to move. The line of cars on the far right started rolling. Just then a breeze kicked up, tipping over several of those stupid inflatable fish. We knew they would never make it through the parade. I've seriously got to re-engineer those things!

But at the time, our only concern was to keep them standing for the next half hour. I hit on the idea of taping them down with electrical tape. We grabbed the one roll of tape (I'm sure I have more, but what with all the rummaging around, the trunk was a wreck by now) and frantically started taping down the fish. The middle line started to roll and we all got in the car.

Then one of the fish in front tipped over again! It hadn't been well taped. I made to get out and fix it, but Georg emphatically said no. He could jump into the car as we started to go, but we couldn't move at all if I was standing on the street. So Georg got out, taped it up as fast as possible, then jumped back in just before we started to roll.