After the rain that added so much chaos and havoc to FloydFest this year, Sunday afternoon’s predicted thunderstorms did not arrive and the four-day event wound down to a nice, bright day and headed into an evening of good weather for a close.

FloydFest 2013 will be remembered as a year of ups and downs. The first sellout of all four days, the maddening problems of getting people from outlying lots to the site in a reasonable length of time and the mud and slippery slopes of parking lots that had to be closed — all are factors that will be discussed and probably cussed in postmortems of what went right and wrong for this year.

Enthusiastic crowds greeted the closing acts on Sunday but some went home early after the drenching rains and problems from Friday night and Saturday. Facebook is littered with critical comments and threats from some to never return.

And the festival will face a long list of questions from politicians, elected officials and second guessers over problems that moved paring from the just off the Parkway lots to the high school and elementary school in Floyd and the Commerce Park just off Christiansburg Pike.

It will be a year of mixed reviews. FloydFest has bounced back from past controversies and they will most likely do so again.

I will have a lot of of photos from this year’s festival in Thursday’s Floyd Press along with a wrap story and a video for the paper’s web site. Then I will retire from coverage of the festival in future years. Before this year’s event, I told Floyd Press editor Wanda Combs that this would be my last year covering the festival because lingering injuries and limitations from last fall’s motorcycle accident have left me unable to do as complete a job as I should. I had to cut this year’s coverage short after falling on Friday.