Last month was the annual UC Davis Picnic Day, the largest university open house event in America, and a tradition that’s been going on since 1909. It’s also a day that usually fills me with a bit of dread, with so many people coming to campus, I usually try to find a way to get out of town. It can be pretty busy, not to mention all the parties going on. Still it can be fun, and we always like the parade. So this year we went down and found a spot by the Quad to watch the Picnic Day Parade go past. It was a good one this year, and I tried to get a quick sketch of it all, though it’s not easy to draw things marching past. I sketched the crowd and the trees before the parade arrived, and while I’d thought I might sketch the marching band or maybe even the fleet of DeLoreans, it was the Penny Farthings I ended up sketching, the symbol of the city of Davis. After the parade, we walked about a bit, my wife and mother in law got some plants from the Plant Science dept, we all got an expensive round of smoothies, then we decided to ditch campus and walk downtown to the Farmers Market. 

Here’s a lot more information about Picnic Day: https://picnicday.ucdavis.edu/history