Total Fun at Totally Trucks

Despite some drizzle and overcast skies, Reston Association held its 11th annual Totally Trucks event Friday at the Central Services Facility on Sunset Hills Road.

The event gave kids of all ages the opportunity to get an up close and personal look at many of the service vehicles that keep Reston up and running year-round.

Aout 600 children visited the lot over the course of morning, says Ashleigh Soloff, Reston Association special events coordinator. The visitors  went home with free Totally Trucks construction hats and coloring books.

"This is just a really exciting event," said Kathleen Driscoll McKee, President of the Reston Association. "It's a family event that lets people make a personal connection with the community."

In addition to mowers, snow plows and delivery vans, kids were crawling all over a fire engine from Fairfax County Station 25 and climbing through the back of a mail truck. There were long lines to reach the front seat of a Fairfax County prisoner transportation vehicle.

From the sound of it, the most popular attraction was an ordinary Reston Association utility truck, whose horn got a nonstop workout for most of the morning. Kids were also able to watch a backhoe, a dump truck and a front end loader at work moving an enormous mountain of dirt set up in the parking lot.

"She said her favorite was the mail truck, definitely," said Christie Bell, a Reston resident who was attending her very first Totally Trucks event with her daughter, Kate, 2. "But she's pretty excited about everything here." And Kate looked right at home sitting atop a mower, wearing her bright yellow Totally Trucks construction hat.

Although the organizers always try to arrange for a fire truck to be on hand for the event, they cannot guarantee it will be available, since the fire and rescue personnel have to be ready to respond to an emergency at any time.

Attendees of the first session of Totally Trucks (there are two to break up the crowds and assuage parking congestion) were treated to sirens and lights as fire truck 425 pulled out of the parking lot to respond to a call. It returned for the second session.

Every other vehicle on display (exceptions being the aforementioned fire truck and police car, which are county vehicles, and the mail truck, which belongs to the government) was attended by one of the 30 staff members employed at the Central Services Facility.

Brian Murphy, Deputy Director of Maintenance for the Reston Association, said his employees love being a part of the event. This year he put three Bombadier sidewalk plows on display – the very same vehicles that were responsible for moving the 54 inches of snow off of Reston's 55 miles of pathways last winter.

Murphy said there weren't any new additions this year to the vehicles on display, but he was thinking about changing things up a bit for 2011.

"I was thinking about contacting the National Guard," he mused. "Maybe a Humvee or a tank for next year? The kids would love that."

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