The Houston Art Car Parade is the biggest art car parade in the world, and the 2001 parade was the biggest ever. The first art car parade in Houston was held in 1987. There were just a few beautifully decorated cars, and a couple thousand people watching.

The parade is a big event in Houston. Owners of the decorated cars try to create a crazy, fun atmosphere for all the people who come to watch the parade. On Saturday, April 28 early in the morning, they started lining up their cars downtown. People who came to watch also came early to see the cars before the parade started, and to talk to the artists who created the cars. This year there were 350 cars, and over 250,000 spectators!

There is also the Art Car Parade Ball, held the previous Thursday evening, this year on the floor of the Astrodome. For the price of a ticket (proceeds to charity), one can see all the cars before they parade through downtown Houston. It's also a chance for some of Houston's more "artistic" denizens to parade their own costumes for the crowd (see the pics to follow; you'll see what I mean!).

The car owners work hard to decorate their cars, which become works of art that sometimes don't even look like cars anymore. There were all kinds of participants in the parade this year, from one that looked like a roach, to the Popemobile, to Sue Shefman's Auto-Potamus. Your humble narrator had the incredible privilege of co-piloting the Auto-Potamus with Sue in this year's parade; a day I will not soon forget.

To give you a feel for the layout of these pages, there are 4 pages from the Art Car Ball, 1 page of Sue's Auto-Potamus from the Ball, and 6 pages from the Parade itself. It's a lot of pages (and pics), but it's worth seeing all these wild art cars.

Let the show begin....