Rainier Vista Park Fireworks and Faderade

I was tired when I got up at 6 a.m. to go to work.  The good thing about it was the day went by pretty fast and I was excited I get to sleep in the next day because we got 4th of July off.  Work was pretty uneventful.  I was just basically working on my individual accounts and making sure none of them had missing or similar sub accounts.  Between that and my meetings that's really all I did today.

When I got home around 4:30 and Ben wanted to go play disc golf at Woodland Creek.  We got all of our stuff together and I changed my clothes.  We headed down and just before we started our first hole, after some putting around, a very familiar guy walked by with his dog.  It was GrandpaDave!  I haven't seen him in years.  He usually pals around with Ohjoy and Da2Svedes.  We chatted with him for a while before he decided he had to go home for dinner.  We continued with our nine holes.

I didn't do too well because I haven't practiced or played in a while.  It showed.  Ben on the other hand has been playing in the afternoons by himself or with Josh.  He even joined the Oly Disc Golf club and has a tag that gets traded around depending on how well you do when you play against each other.  He currently has number 99 out of about 200.

Since we had to wait until about 9-9:30 to walk over to Rainier Vista, Ben and I decided to do our monthly grocery shopping visit to Walmart.  We got home and unloaded and put the groceries away.  We ate some dinner and went and picked up Travis and Erika from the hotel.  They had just gotten back from a day trip to Seattle with our parents to go see Doug.  We stopped at Safeway for them on the way back to our house and they bought fried chicken and Gatorade.  I asked Erika, "why so much Gatorade?"  "For Faderade duh!"  "What's Faderade?"  "Gatorade mixed with vodka or rum."  "Ah, gotcha."

We went back to our place and chatted with Erika and Travis while they ate an entire bucket of Safeway fried chicken.  By about 9:15 I started getting glowsticks, jackets and blankets together for our firework show.  I've never been to the Lacey fireworks as far as I knew.  They used to have it over by Huntamer Park but moved it to Rainier Vista because the crowd kept getting bigger and bigger.  I was glad we lived within walking distance because there was literally no parking.  We started walking over and people had started parking on the sides of Ruddell Road! 

We saw some dead roadkill, people dropped stuff as they walked towards the park and we kept getting stuck behind slow people.  At one point a group of people were trying to preach to us about Jesus.  Once we got there we found a place to put our blankets down to watch.  I wasn't sure where the fireworks would be exactly so I looked for a sign that said where to look.  We oriented ourselves accordingly away from trees with our Faderade and glow sticks.

It started within minutes of us sitting down.  I was pretty impressed with the show, granted it only lasted about 15 minutes like most shows, it was visible and we all had a great time. 

It was nice hanging out and doing some stuff with Erika since she left Washington for the military  Travis had to pee so he wandered around the park in the dark away from people. We sat there a good 20 minutes before we packed up our stuff and walked home.  We didn't realize how far of a walk it really was from our house.

It was about 11 when we got home.  Erika and Travis hung out for about another hour and Ben was surprised when he ran into Tyler, a guy Suzanne was seeing, in the hallway.  He was a bit confused at first but everything was straightened out.  We had no idea he was going to be at the house.  There were many side conversations until Erika was ready to go back to the hotel.  They got into the Escape and I took them back to the hotel. 

When I got home I showered and relaxed for a bit before passing out hard.  I was exhausted.

Next Adventure:  4th of July at the Lake