Perfect day for Egg-stravaganza, Arbor Day event

Eyes wide with wonder, Justin Destry, 4, watched Uncle Curt the clown stretch the green rubber strip and wrap it round his fingers.

And blow to create a spiraling balloon.

With a twist or two, the clown attached the neon-bright spiral to the blue, bike-helmet-shaped cap he'd created from another balloon a minute earlier.

"Got a hat!" Justin exclaimed.

There were plenty of balloon hats to be blown, faces to be painted and hoops to be hula-ed at the Richmond Parks and Recreation Department's Egg-stravaganza festival at Pine Camp Arts and Community Center.

And, of course, eggs to be hunted under yesterday's cloudless sky -- some 12,000 plastic eggs, each stuffed with a piece of candy and scattered across the grass.

To keep things fair, the parks department separated the roughly hundreds of kids at the event into three groups.

They probably needed to -- the 5to 7-year-olds picked clean the 70-by150-foot area reserved for them in less than three minutes.

The girls from the Pine Camp Center's dance classes, dressed in brightly colored Disney character costumes, were on hand to help the littlest.

With Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White (India Gardner, 10, and Andris Murray, 12) helping him, a 2-year-old too shy to say his name emerged from the fray with a bucket full of eggs. Jeremy Coleman, 4, managed just fine filling his burlap sack on his own with his more deliberate step-step-squat approach.

Across town, another crowd celebrated Arbor Day at the Carillon with workshops on trees, music from acoustic group Van Driver, and tree climbing.

For some, such as sisters Isabella and Willoughby Hardesty, 8 and 6, that meant pulling themselves hand over hand up a rope, 35 feet into the air.

The view?

Just trees, Isabella said.

For Isabelle Winning, 2½, it was a less intimidating couple of steps up the gnarled lower trunk of a dwarf redwood, to get about 3 feet off the ground.

"Say goodbye, tree," mother Alicia Winning said when it was time to head home.

Isabelle just bawled.

Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or .