A grand day on Grand Avenue!

What a great day Saturday was! For us, it started out with catching critters being transported from home ranch to pasture, then getting ready for "Grand Openings on Grand Avenue," probably the best downtown event I've seen in 20 years.

Art was the centerpiece, the stimulus, and particularly the grand opening of Veryl Goodnight's gallery. She's in the top picture, wearing the yellow tags, talking to some visitors in her gallery. Veryl's an internationally sculptor, recently moved here from Santa Fe. She and her husband, Roger Brooks, have been incredibly supportive of the arts community in Mancos ... not just their own gallery ... and supported their gallery manager, Jamie Bade, in being a key person in putting this event together. The bottom picture shows the downtown block of Grand Avenue, from Main Street at the top to Mesa Street out of sight to the right, blocked off and vendor booths set up in the middle of the street.

The shops were full and there were arts demonstrations and music at several places in the block. People just ambled in and out of shops and booths or stopped to listen and watch, like the grandpa cowboy with his fledgling cowhand grandsons at the Geezer Trumpets program. 

We've had open houses before at Artisans, but usually I look around and see mostly members of the co-op. Saturday, the gallery had lots of non-members all afternoon.

Our hope, collectively, is that this will be a kick-off for a renaissance in historic, downtown Mancos ... Mancos on the Move. For the first time in my 20 years here, all but one of the buildings in that block are open with operating businesses! Art was the organizing theme for this event, with several businesses holding grand openings, but we have the Renaissance Faire in June, Mancos Days in July, Sugar Pine Ranch Rally and the Mancos Valley Balloon Festival in early and late September ... lots of reasons for folks to come back to Mancos! If folks are here from Michigan or Texas or Tahiti, that's fine, but we've realized we have a market of about 200,000 people within 1 1/2 hours of Mancos.

Finally, this event seemed to mark a tipping point, a switch from YOYO thinking (You're On Your Own) to WITT (We're In This Together). tv