Arizona revelers invited to be guests at parade

Visit Hot Springs says it extended an invitation on Tuesday to “heartbroken revelers” in Tucson, Arizona, to be special guests at the First Ever 20th Annual World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Hot Springs after it was announced that the Arizona St. Patrick’s Day parade had been canceled.

“We just learned from an article in the Arizona Daily Sun that Tucson had canceled their St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Festival due to increased costs and obstructions to the parade route,” Visit Hot Springs CEO Steve Arrison said in a news release.

“It’s a crying shame that all those folks in Tucson won’t be able to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day with the rest of us,” Arrison said, “so we’re extending an invitation for Tucson celebrants to come enjoy our world-famous parade on 98-foot Bridge Street on March 17. We’d even be happy to add them to our parade if they’d like to form a group and march along with the other zany participants.”

The Arizona Daily Star report was posted on www.tucson.com, Arrison said.

The article said that John Murphy, the president of the Tucson parade and festival, announced on Jan. 27 that both the town’s parade and the accompanying festival would be canceled. Murphy was quoted as saying “we will bring Tucson a bigger and better St. Patrick’s Day parade and festival on Sunday, March 17, 2024.”

Murphy said factors in the cancellation of the festivities included increased expenses and that planters installed to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe along the parade route obstruct the parade viewing area and make “a smooth flow of event traffic impossible.”

“We know very well that factors impacting the St. Patrick’s Day parade are really distressing, since we here in Hot Springs had to drastically scale back our own parade in 2020 and 2021 because of the global pandemic,” Arrison said.

“For that reason, Hot Springs welcomes our Tucson fellow revelers to come join us and enjoy all the great fun that Hot Springs has to offer.”

Arrison announced Monday that The World’s Biggest Potato on Wheels, a gigantic Idaho russet spud as long as a semi-truck, had confirmed that it will be back this year as one of the enduring crowd favorites.