Winners will be chosen early next week. We'll choose some of our favorite photos and comments, and pick a random tweet or two. You'll win a Sandbar t-shirt of your choice and maybe some cool trinkets just for fun.
Those are just a few of the ways you can participate online for our 21st birthday, whether you're at the party or halfway across the world.
We definitely want to see your pictures and videos, so be sure to tweet, Facebook, upload, or email them to us! And, we'll also be looking for a few good bloggers to write a recap of their party experience for us. So keep track of any funny stories from the party, because we'll be asking for them!
Check back for ways you can win PRIZES for social-medializing with us!
It's almost here! Just a few more days until our 21st birthday bash. Like last year, we ordered commemorative shirts.
Bartender Joe drew the original artwork (first published here) and then we turned it over to the fine folks at Hasty Awards in Ottawa to work their magic.
Here's our new design:
Do you love it? We do!
The shirts will be available at our block party on Saturday. If you can't make it to the party, we're happy to take email orders. Just send us an email at sandbar@thesandbar.com and let us know what size you need, and we can work out payment arrangements.
Shirts come in sizes small through double extra large, and they'll be $15 each.
Less than two weeks until our big bash! We hope you're as excited as we are.
Like the artwork? The theme of our party is "Finally Legal," since the bar's turning 21 and that's the birthday almost everyone looks forward to. Joe the now-former bartender was drafted to create some fancy artwork for us, and the picture above is what he came up with. It's been modified into a fantastic t-shirt design, which we'll unveil soon.
On to the updates.
The street in front of the bar will close at 1 p.m. on Saturday, August 14. We need time to get everything ready! The bar will still be open, of course, but you'll have to excuse us while we run around like crazy people.
The beer garden will open at 5 p.m. There will be a cover charge and you have to be 21 to enter the beer garden. You'll have to go through the beer garden to get inside the bar. We'll have beer service outside in the garden- with more staff than last year so hopefully the wait for a drink won't be quite so long.
Live music! We'll have three bands this year. Stomper, made up of our neighbors next door at Richard's Music Company, will be back this year to kick things off around 5 p.m.
At around 6:30, Katlyn Conroy and the Wild and Wooly will take the stage. For those of you who don't know, Katlyn is Peach's niece- the daughter of Peach's brother Patrick, who she bought the Sandbar from many years ago. Katlyn is also a very highly acclaimed singer, songwriter and musician. We're excited to have her play at our party- our way of keeping it in the family!
At 8 p.m., the Sandbar float dancers will entertain the crowd for a few minutes. Finally, our headline act Mark Valentine and the Ones will play all our favorite cover songs until midnight.
This event is free and family-friendly. Kids are welcome to come dance in the street! No alcohol is allowed outside the beer garden. There will also be water, soda and food available for purchase.
All of our neighbors have graciously given their support for this party. Please support their businesses, too!
It wouldn't be a Sandbar party without some extravagant surprises, so we won't reveal everything here. You'll just have to come out to our party and experience it all yourself!
Last summer as we prepared for our big birthday shindig, we made a slideshow. We asked you, our customers for the last 20 years, for pictures of you and your friends at the Sandbar. You responded. We got lots of great pictures of you celebrating birthdays, dancing on the bar and playing with goofy Sandbar drink toys.
We used these pictures to create a slideshow, and our friend Tony set it up to broadcast on a small screen above our pirate ship stage during the entire party. There are 817 pictures in the slideshow. It runs for over an hour. That's a lot of pictures! But 20 years is a long time for a bar to be in business, and we wanted to capture as much of its history as possible.
I finally found time to upload all 817 pictures to Flickr. Unfortunately, Flickr won't allow me to sort the images by their title (or at least I can't figure out how to do it), so the order that I painstakingly put these pictures in is lost.
Here it is. I don't expect you to sit and watch all 817 slides, but if you don't have anything better to do, there's some great pictures here!
We hope you enjoyed a look back at 20 years of the Sandbar! We're 21 and finally legal this year, and we couldn't be happier.
