Tamale Festival

        

Yuma, Arizona       High 68 Low 46

Today started out quite chilly and cloudy this morning, but the sun finally came out and the day ended up being very nice.

We have been seeing signs all over about a Tamale Festival in the nearby town of Somerton. We have wanted to go see what it was all about and since I like tamales, we went. The town is about 25 minutes away from our Park.

When we got there the nearest parking was at a grocery store. They had security out to stop you from parking if you weren’t going to the store but we asked permission to stop long enough for Linda to set up my Mother-in laws scooter, and he said OK.

  The main street of the town was blocked off and loaded up with lots of (43) tamale vendors, some other commercial vendors and stages with entertainment at both ends of almost 3 blocks of the town.

We luckily found parking at the City Park which was 3 blocks from the event. The entire city Police department must have been there plus some police from the nearby Indian Reservation.

The tamales are paid for at several ticket booths and you have to decide how many you are going to eat.

I tried a chicken tamale and later a pineapple one that I didn’t care for very much. After walking to the end of the Festival, we found out about a shrimp tamale at one of the booths, and decided to try it. It was one of the longer lines and after waiting through about half of the line, we found out they were out of shrimp so we went to a different booth that didn’t have near the line and very quickly got our tamales. I had beef this time and Cindy got a spinach and sour cream on that she said was pretty good.

The girls from this booth got a trophy for the best tamales of the Festival.

I'm at the far left in this picture. I had waited about 20 minutes when we found out all the shrimp tamales were gone.

Lots and lots of people.

We had read that last year nearly 35,000 hungry people attended the Festival and there were probably that many today.

After going this time, I don’t know if we would go another year, but maybe. Anyway it was a good way to spend the day.

Thanks for visiting.