On Friday it was the 4th of July and that means one thing here in the USA, Public Holiday!!! Being on a Friday made it even more sweet as it was a 3 day weekend and it would have been perfect had Heidi not had to work in the afternoon, but we made the most of it! In the morning I convinced Heidi to go for a ride with me. However I was thinking around the lake somewhere, nice and flat. But since we had dog duty over the weekend (Heidi’s parents were out of town so someone had to check on the animals) a ride down near Federal Way was smarter. Heidi assured me there was somewhere nice and flat called the BPA Trail. Sounds fine to me, even if it was a little bit short. Well it was short, and it wasn’t flat. There was some DAMN large hills on that trail and it almost killed me. At a total ride of 8.5km (we had to take the long way back as they shut the trail for a fun run) it was shorter than my usual 10km, but the giant hills made up for it (I was on my lowest gear and still struggling up that hill!).

After the ride and some breakfast, Heidi decided to take me off to experience some fireworks, my first real fireworks experience in the USA. 4th of July has a reputation for partying pretty hard with lots of fireworks involved. So even though fireworks are illegal in certain parts of Seattle (Renton being one of them), just a short drive from our house is the Muckleshoot Reservation, where anything goes! You know you are getting close when the queue of cars stretches out to a mile, and you can hear constant explosions going off. I was giddy like a school girl! This was refferred to by some as “Boom Alley” or the “Muckleshoot Fireworks Avenue”, but to me it was like Sideshow Alley at the Ekka, only replace dodgy games with EXPLOSIVES!

I had a blast scoping out some of the craziness and then Heidi took us to the one store she always went to, where they knew her by site (and her dad who holds a pretty decent reputation for dropping loads of cash on fireworks) where we got a decent sized range for the $10 investment. We let off all sorts of goodies in the pit and in the end, I got to almost blow my hand off, get a firework shot at me from someone else and have the beejeebus scared out of me after realising something we were told had a pretty hefty boom (it was smaller than a 250ml soda can), which we didn’t believe, almost felt like it was going to knock me over.

I had a blast (pun intended) at the Fireworks pit and after I dropped Heidi off at work, the rest of my day went into nothingness really. It was just same old same old (I did get to finish my Anchorage photos) really. The best part of my day was those fireworks and I know a lot of people got them, because from about 8pm till I went to sleep around 11pm it was non stop. It got a lot stronger after 10pm when the sun went down. But hey, that’s the fourth of July for ya!