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Hello, city of Albert Lea. My name is Cheyl Murphy-Long. I am the co-chair of the 52nd Van Nationals that we will be hosting at the Freeborn County Fairgrounds the week of July 7 to 13. We hosted this same event back in July of 2020. A van nationals is a large group (1,500 to 2,000 or more) people who get together and camp at fairgrounds and whatnot, and we have bands, do games, have awards ceremonies, party and have a great time with our vanning family. Vanning is very family oriented and has been around since the beginning of the ’70s … it was much larger then. Us that are still doing it are keeping it alive. We have weekend events all over the United States all year long. You have to have a van to get into these events but always welcome anyone to come and check us out to see if this is something you may be interested in.

Last time as well as this time we did a cruise around your beautiful lake and then parked our vans downtown for you all to see. We had such great support from the town of Albert Lea and got a key to the city from the mayor, who came and checked us out as well.

So with that we will be doing a cruise around the lake on Saturday, July 12 starting at 10:30 a.m. and should arrive downtown by 11 a.m. or a little after to do a public show and shine for you all to come and check out our creativity of the beautiful work we have put into these vans. There will be a few blocks of us parked on the north end of Broadway on Fountain so you won’t miss us. So please come out and check out the vans and the people. Talk to us, get to know us — we are a pretty good group of people. Who knows, you may decide it might be something you wanna check out in life.

We are very excited to be back in your city, and thank you for having us.

Cheryl Murphy-Long
co-chair
52nd Van Nationals