Sunday, July 5, 2009

Our celebration of the fourth ...

It had been 3-4 years since Mr. Jones and I had gone downtown to see the fireworks ... we used to go every single year! But we decided, kind of last minute, to do it again this year. We drove down with our friends, Tom and Judy, got ourselves situated on the lawn at Ah-Nab-Awen Park, right by the Gerald R. Ford Museum, at about 4:30 in the afternoon. These pictures are somewhat out of order, but that's okay. When we first got downtown, it wasn't very crowded at all. We'd had a somewhat cool and overcast day, with a forecast of late afternoon showers ... but at a little after 5:00, the skies cleared, the sun showed up (!) and it was perfect!
There was a lot of music going on down there last night. Jerry Barnabe was the MC for the entire evening, and it was a good time!
Carissa Wilson started the entertainment with the singing of the National Anthem. We know Carissa's family, so it was cool to have her singing the anthem this year.
The crowd grew all throughout the evening. By about 9:00, there wasn't an inch of lawn unoccupied. There was lots of fun stuff for little kids to do ... Bozo the Clown showed up and did his stage show. There was even a talent show on the order of "American Idol!"
And the fireworks were simply spectacular! Amazing! Wonderful!



This glittery gold one has always been my favorite, since I was a little kid ... so I was pretty excited to get a decent picture of it! There were 3800 fireworks shot off last night. It was so worth going down to see ... even with waiting 20 minutes to get out of the parking lot and another 20 minutes sitting in traffic that was just NOT moving!
This evening, our church put on an outdoor patriotic concert with free food ... complete with honor guard, a demonstration of the honor ceremony given at military funerals (and I thought of you, Jesse, and how you've been doing this down at Ft. Bliss), and then the choir sang a whole bunch of songs ...
It was a great time! Do you see Mr. Jones in the back row, right under the flag by the stars? I hope your 4th of July celebration this year was as nice as ours!

4 comments:

Emily said...

We did have fun! We met some of out neighbors last Friday. They were firing out their own fireworks. It was fun to watch all the little neighbor boys. I had a glance of what our little boy could be. Saturday we grilled for the second time. The first time was Friday. The burgers were yummy! Sunday we went to the Twin/Tigers game. I'm not really into baseball but it was okay. I think the Twins won. Tigers weren't doing to tell when we left (we wanted to beat the traffic and we had to take the light rail back).

Emily said...

I meant our neighbors...I can't type today.

Mom Jones said...

Hi Emily! Only 10 weeks left until you meet that little boy of yours! It sounds like you had a good weekend. I love grilled burgers too!

Sabrina said...

I missed you all this year. We went downtown but it wasn't anything like in GR.