Downtown Wapakoneta has an exciting weekend planned as they continue their Summer Moon Festival events.
Down Auglaize Street is a celebration that feels out of this world. Every year, Wapakoneta likes to pay tribute to their hometown hero Neil Armstrong with the Summer Moon Festival. After seeing over 20,000 people here for the 50th-anniversary festival, and a small crowd for last year's scaled-down events, everyone is ready for celebrations to be back to normal.
This summer is the 52nd anniversary of the first steps taken on the moon. Neil Armstrong, the man to take those steps, grew up in Wapak, and it’s something the city loves to remember.
People spent Thursday afternoon setting up for the next couple of days of fun. The bed races, moon market, and live music are just a few of the events planned that people look forward to every year.
Jackie Martell, the executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Wapak says, “It is hard to describe just how good this feels. The energy is just so big amongst all the vendors that get to come. It’s our biggest vendor event, we have over 77 vendors that are opening on Friday for our moon market.
We have the food trucks that are so happy to come, there’s over 12 of those, and then just the response from people Tuesday Night’s event as well as our pageant last night, it’s just a really positive feeling amongst everyone that’s happy to get out and enjoy themselves.”
They’re calling this year’s festival the “Year of the Frogmen” as they invited the four navy men who worked to recover Apollo 11 after it returned from the moon and landed in the pacific ocean. They will be around all weekend for meet and greets.
To see a full list of events for the weekend, head summermoonfestival.com.
