Walking to Street Painting Festival in Lake Worth

My friends wanted to sell bottled water to benefit ALS at the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival and I wanted to help them. I love that festival, live in Lake Worth and plan to participate in 2015 Walk to Defeat ALS.

Just last June, we lost our mutual friend, Susan Spencer-Wendel, to that awful disease, She wasn't even 50, but she packed a whole lot of living into her 47 years. She was a wife, mother of three, sister, daughter, best-selling writer and a courts reporter for The Palm Beach Post.

We gathered in front of the @The-Hair.Net salon, owned by Kerri Olah-Brennan who was Susan's hairdresser and is a SpenWen Team co-captain along with me and Susan's sister Stephanie Harwood-Parlamento; Kerri's wife, Pamela Olah-Brennan, who is on the 2015 Walk to Defeat ALS committee with Kerri and me; Bridget Hammond, owner of In-Nae Tae Kwon Do studio in Lake Clarke Shores and a SpenWen Team member; and several others who were selling costume jewelry, raffle tickets for a baby doll and hand-made bracelets. We raised more than $1,500 during the festival.

Kerri Olah-Brennan (left) and her wife Pam sell $2 bottled water
for the ALS Walk.

I live about 1 mile north of the festival, so I gladly walked to it to avoid the hassle of the traffic and finding a place to park.

Here are some of the striking street paintings that I saw:

Susan and John Wendel's son, Wesley, drew this picture.
He is quite the artist! 

Striking a pose

A young girl poses on the Ariel drawing. The festival did not 
have a theme for its drawings this year, which gave the event
 an eclectic feel.

A young woman adds the finishing touches to her drawing 
of a mom holding two babies.

Meghan McKenna starts to fill in the words with black
chalk on this drawing for Bazooka Digital, her digital
services company. The words say: Good shoes take you
good places.

The 3-D effect

Loved this 3-D drawing of girls jumping on lily pads.

The woman who just completed the drawing for the WXEL
PBS TV station is wearing a T-shirt that says: "Chalk
dirty to me."

Interactive art

My favorite interactive of the festival was this four-sided
wall that allowed people to fill in the rest of the statement:
"Before I die, I want to ..."
What would you write? I simply
thought "live"  would be the best answer.

All told, I added an additional 3.5 miles that day to my walking total for that Sunday.

And now, for my numbers

I had my best walking day last week on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015, when I walked:

Steps: 12,966

Miles: 6.5