July 4th

I celebrated the 4th of July on the 3rd this year. The town near my brother's house had fireworks last night and so we went..."far from the madding crowd"...except, not. Ask my brother about the crowd. I'm pretending crowds don't bother me. I was a LITTLE bothered at the 40+ minute wait to get out of the parking lot when it was over. Other than that, it was fun.

I got to take some pictures of my niece, nephews, brother and sister-in-law. In the past 4 years we have spent a lot of time and all of our holidays together. Excuse me, but with our impending move I'm feeling a bit wistful.

There were food vendors all around the area where the fireworks would eventually be lit. We had a veritable sugar feast: cotton candy, snow cones and funnel cakes. Can you believe I had never tried funnel cakes before?

My car is sort of the modern version of yesteryear's station wagon. The kids think being able to goof around in the back end is the coolest thing, so I opened up the roof, put down the tailgate and set them free. Unfortunately, this didn't work as a spot for viewing the fireworks because I had parked in front of a tree. Oops!
I don't know anything about taking pictures of fireworks displays, but I wanted to see if my camera was capable of capturing the images. It is. No doubt if I knew what I was doing it would take incredible pictures. Here are a couple, just to prove I was there.

And now, on the actual 4th, we are staying home. Not long ago I lamented the fact that I could not watch the fireworks in Washington D.C. In fact I am home so I COULD have gone into D.C., but have chosen again to avoid the crowd.