Fantastic 4th

We spent a little more time at Holmes Lake… some on foot…

and some on the kayak.

If you look closely you can see a baby Barn Swallow in this nest under the bridge.

We celebrated Kevin’s birthday with dinner…

and one of Becky’s beautiful cakes! Angel food with real cream whipped with pudding, and lots of strawberries! Awesome!!

We then went downtown and tried our combined intelligences on the challenge of an escape room! We got off to a slow start, but ended up finishing it with 33 seconds to spare! So WE ESCAPED! It was a lot of fun… and we found out that is their hardest escape room. The fastest time recorded was 40 some minutes. Almost as challenging as the escape room was finding parking downtown!

To further celebrate, we walked around the Haymarket area downtown. A gorgeous evening!

Kevin got a huge “Bean Bag” chair… which came compressed into a relatively small box. When unwrapped, you were to fluff it up, and soon you have a huge bean bag. They had lots of fun getting it ready!

We got to spend a bit of time with the cousins.

And with Great Grandma Joanne…

Becky made an incredible 4th of July cake – with graham crackers, real whipped cream, and lots of blueberries! Yum!

I’ve never been able to try and photograph fireworks. Lincoln goes CRAZY with fireworks – all neighborhoods shoot off displays that look like professional shows! Kevin and Becky did some with the grandkids (and us and great grandma). Their street was blocked off, and everyone was shooting off lots of fireworks in the middle of the street. Some were so large they covered several houses! Amazing amount of pyrotechnics, lasting till at least 11pm.

This shot looks more like some weird star…

I had lots of fun – while the neighborhood shot off fireworks, I shot them with my camera. Unlike a professional show, it was hard to anticipate where the next cool ones would show up. Note how large these were compared to the houses.

The morning after, most homes had piles of exploded debris stacked up. We saw this trailer, which had launched maybe a hundred of the big huge professional ones.