Parade - Pie - Fireworks

A town near us had their yearly town festival.  The parade is the highlight of the day as their parade is the most fun one around the area.  No need to get there early, five minutes will do, there is ample room for everyone.   I hate those parade where you sit five deep and your lawn chair arms are touching someone elses lawn chair arm that you don't even know.   That is a little too close for comfort.

The people on the floats threw out huge handfuls of candy.  Spark also got a flyswatter, can cozies, freezees, beach ball, super ball, stickers, peanuts, popcorn and bottles of water.   A good deal for Spark is that most of the candy has food coloring and so Dancer can't have any of it.  You can see how full his bag is so we put the candy away and will ration it out to him, probably from now until Halloween. 

Spark entered a pie eating contest.  No picture as we thought there wouldn't be anything to take a picture of.  Dad ran to the car to get the camera but by the time he got back the contest was done.  Spark didn't win but the good thing about a pie eating contest is, even if you loose, you still get to eat pie!  Dancer didn't participate because they were pudding pies and some were vanilla pudding, which is loaded with food coloring.  It is amazing how an allergy can affect your life so much.

Every year there is a vendor that sells these homemade potato chips with ranch dressing.  They are soooo good and we look forward to them every summer.

Storms were brewing all around us and there were tornado warning about 40 miles up the road.  We didn't get anything here thankfully.  The sun was behind a huge wall cloud and so it only shown on the other side of the road and the tops of the trees.  It was weird and eerie. 

We got a rainbow and didn't have to have the rain ruin our evening as we were anticipating going to the fireworks.

 

It is just about dark and Spark is waiting for the first big boom!

This is our first time trying to take pictures of fireworks.  Dad the read camera book on how to do it while we were waiting for them to begin.  We need to work on our technique a little bit.  One thing that would have help would have been to be much closer.  We were about 3/4 of a mile away from where they were being shot off so they were quite small in the sky.  Normally we go into town to watch them but it was still threatening to rain.  We went to the top of a  high hill to watch where we could be right by the car and make a quick get away if the rain came.

The whole evening there was lighting all over the sky and we weren't able to catch a picture of it because it was so fast and we couldn't take the picture fast enough when it would flash.  Here though we got a picture of a fireworks going off at the same time lightening flashed.  The lightening was far enough away that we could see it on the horizon but not hear the thunder.