Auburn’s new friend Otto the Rock Snake

AUBURN, Ky. – One way to keep kids busy during the summer allows one local community’s neat project to help stem their creativity.

In Auburn, a long-standing tradition for the last six years has been to paint rocks.

“It’s probably been about three or four years now that they would paint rocks and share them or hide them in the community. That way, I could just find them and make you smile, pick up a rock. They put sweet little messages on them. But within the last couple of years, we have done a weekly prize to highlight our local businesses,” Rhonda Sullivan, event/tourism coordinator for the City of Auburn and founder of Auburn KY Rocks, says.

However, recently, the community has rallied around a new friend: Otto the Rock Snake.

“In the last, I’d say, two to three weeks, I got like seven or eight emails of people wanting to do a snake. I had somebody in City Hall that said she would paint the head for me. We had the head Friday, and here it is Monday, and it has grown really good over the weekend,” Sullivan says.

Otto is available on the corner by the Auburn Fire Department, and anyone can add to him.

“Anybody can paint these, and lots of them have. A lot of people have donated the prizes for the rocks weekly. If you’re homeschooled or you’re an artist and you want to paint these rocks, just go and hide them,” Sullivan says.