Monday, July 6, 2009

4th of July ....and...NO RAIN !!!!!

At least there was no rain where I was!! Which is good enough for me!
I hear there WAS rain back home, but what the heck. I didn't really care. (sorry...)

This is a view from my nephew's balcony. THIS is where we were the 4th of July, all day.
New York City ish...(Called New Jersey)

I've never seen anything so spectacular.


This was at sunset. The fireworks were in the Hudson River this year, to commemorate the 400th year since Henry Hudson stumbled upon the Hudson River.
The fire boat is shooting water, for effect, no doubt. When it started, one strand of water was bright red and another was bright blue. You know, for the Red, White and Blue stuff.
However, the red and the blue ran out after a while, so it was all white.
That is one of the Macy's fireworks barges, which situated itself around 6 PM. There were SIX of them. All conveniently located right in front of our vantage point. It was really nice of them to do that, doncha think?


It's starting to get dark...an important ingredient for fireworks. You can see 2 of the barges here.

Voila !!!  Fireworks!!! All computerized, so that all six barges shot out the same stuff, timed perfectly. 
Sidebar: When it was all over, and we all caught our collective breaths, and were thankful that the balcony didn't collapse under the weight of all of our bodies that were eating and drinking all day.....we noticed that one of the barges was on FIRE !!!! A really good sized FIRE!! With flames, and all.

Were any of the fireboats around? Heck, no.

Some little rinky dink boat pulled up and some guy took out one hose and doused the flames.... in due time.

It was a wonderful day. Thanks, my beautiful nephew !!

THEN, as if that wasn't enough, the next day we got taken on a schooner trip up and down the aforementioned Hudson River. (NOTE: no rain...)
It was in the low 80's and breezy enough to use the sails on the schooner, which I think is the main idea.

We went down river, past where the poor twin towers used to be, :-( , and down to the Statue of Liberty, around it, and back up river. We didn't fall off the ship, even when it was sailing completely on it's side. And most importantly, I didn't get sea sick, which I am prone to do even just walking around.

We had a wonderful weekend, stayed dry as a bone, and now are back home.
Thank you my dear sister and husband.
I hope you all had a great weekend, too.

Update: It's 9:35 AM on Tuesday and it's (gulp) raining.