4th of July 2013 (part 1)

As promised earlier, here is my tourist-spolosion weekend recap:

Once a year kitchy Americana is OK by me, encouraged even! And Ben really, really, really likes fireworks but hates, hates, hates loud noise, so we watch the fireworks from afar every year. The amazing bonus of watching from a higher elevation is that 1) your neck doesn’t hurt from craning your gaze towards the sky, and 2) you can see at least a dozen fireworks displays along the horizon! It was an amazing site, but I forgot to take the polarizing lens off of my camera so most of my photos came out too blurry and/or dark to bother publishing.

One awesome, uniquely DC thing about the fireworks is that they’re launched from the Tidal Basin towards the Washington Monument (which looks like an awful pop art installation with it’s current scaffolding shroud). That means that the flight path to National Airport, along the Potomac River, is still safe for air traffic and there were planes flying between us and the fireworks!

Also, I dare anyone who has visited the new Air Force Memorial to describe the memorial without goofy arm gestures. It is so HUGE and SWOOPY!

(part 2)