Sunday morning
It's quiet outside - lots of birds chirping.
It's going to be a hot one but K and I went to the beach yesterday and it was plenty hot there, I can tell you. (Does that sound dirty? Only a little.)
We lolled about a bit in the early morning, had coffee, had to run back to the house for something and weren't really on the road until 9:30ish, which is late for us.
We hadn't realized about the Air Show.
The Air Show takes place yearly at the beach to the west of the beach that K and I visit.
Thousands of people attend and this was obvious by the traffic on the highway to the beach.
The Authorities closed the roads, in fact, and it took us nearly two hours to get to our half-hour-away beach.
Some backstory about me and airshows:
My dear dad loved a good airshow.
I? Not so much.
But, then again, I was a girl who liked shoe shopping. The idea of standing on hot pavement whilst watching planes in the sky did nothing for me.
My dad traveled places to see airshows!
He went to National Airshows.
And, when he lived (and died) in Oklahoma City he attended the airshow there.
We were all there together the year a pilot was killed - crashing his plane, somehow, into the tarmac. (We were walking to the parking area and saw a plume of black smoke.)
I attended my last airshow one summer there in OKC. In fact, that may have been the one. And I'm pretty sure I was pregnant with Middle. And I know for a fact that it was well over 100 degrees.
But I've gone off on a tangent here...
K and I were sitting in the Jeep, in crawling traffic, wondering if we'd ever make it to the beach when suddenly and incredibly loudly, an F22 flew very low but astonishingly quickly over our heads.
It was tremendous.
It was deafening.
It did some stunts whilst we sat with looks of wonder on our faces.
I called Middle (home in bed) and narrated and let him hear the force of it. (He is a fighter-plane enthusiast.)
We took a couple of pictures.
Its final trick of the day was to hover, just slightly, with its nose up, and not move forward.
We were stunned.
The beach was lovely. Warm and not too crowded and we unwound a little and I walked in the water which was so bitingly cold that it hurt my feet.
When we got home, Middle told me all the specs of the plane and described how it hovered.
He told me how much it cost and how fast it flies and what it is capable of.
And I didn't think about how much my dad would absolutely adore that Middle knows and is interested in all this stuff until now - just this minute. They would be great buddies.
He's a great kid.
Here's another, I think. I'm enjoying reading her from over here in far left field.
I'm off to clean up and see Youngest march in the parade.
It's going to be a hot one but K and I went to the beach yesterday and it was plenty hot there, I can tell you. (Does that sound dirty? Only a little.)
We lolled about a bit in the early morning, had coffee, had to run back to the house for something and weren't really on the road until 9:30ish, which is late for us.
We hadn't realized about the Air Show.
The Air Show takes place yearly at the beach to the west of the beach that K and I visit.
Thousands of people attend and this was obvious by the traffic on the highway to the beach.
The Authorities closed the roads, in fact, and it took us nearly two hours to get to our half-hour-away beach.
Some backstory about me and airshows:
My dear dad loved a good airshow.
I? Not so much.
But, then again, I was a girl who liked shoe shopping. The idea of standing on hot pavement whilst watching planes in the sky did nothing for me.
My dad traveled places to see airshows!
He went to National Airshows.
And, when he lived (and died) in Oklahoma City he attended the airshow there.
We were all there together the year a pilot was killed - crashing his plane, somehow, into the tarmac. (We were walking to the parking area and saw a plume of black smoke.)
I attended my last airshow one summer there in OKC. In fact, that may have been the one. And I'm pretty sure I was pregnant with Middle. And I know for a fact that it was well over 100 degrees.
But I've gone off on a tangent here...
K and I were sitting in the Jeep, in crawling traffic, wondering if we'd ever make it to the beach when suddenly and incredibly loudly, an F22 flew very low but astonishingly quickly over our heads.
It was tremendous.
It was deafening.
It did some stunts whilst we sat with looks of wonder on our faces.
I called Middle (home in bed) and narrated and let him hear the force of it. (He is a fighter-plane enthusiast.)
We took a couple of pictures.
Its final trick of the day was to hover, just slightly, with its nose up, and not move forward.
We were stunned.
The beach was lovely. Warm and not too crowded and we unwound a little and I walked in the water which was so bitingly cold that it hurt my feet.
When we got home, Middle told me all the specs of the plane and described how it hovered.
He told me how much it cost and how fast it flies and what it is capable of.
And I didn't think about how much my dad would absolutely adore that Middle knows and is interested in all this stuff until now - just this minute. They would be great buddies.
He's a great kid.
Here's another, I think. I'm enjoying reading her from over here in far left field.
I'm off to clean up and see Youngest march in the parade.
Comments
Would Middle ever consider becoming a pilot? I gather he's so passionate about fighters ...
I never nap, but somehow on Saturday I dozed for a bit, and apparently quite deeply, because somehow slept right through as 6 of those planes flew by…
If my husband hadn't of been such a talent at what he ended up doing, he would have applied for US citizenship just to join the USAF just to fly their planes. That's how much he loves 'em.
The first airshow he ever took us to, in a "stunt" segment, when 3 planes were buzzing around - I caught a glimpse of two of them passing so closely that I covered my eyes, and said to my mother (who was sitting beside me) "They're going to crash". No sooner were the words out of my mouth, and they did. I didn't see the crash - my eyes were still closed, but all of the noise from all of those engines simply stopped.
Two pilots died right there on the runway.
It was a sad, sad day.
And the jet, bb? That hovered? Was it a Harrier?
The jet that hovered was an F22 - though it didn't exactly hover, the pilot tilted the nose up and did some reverse thruster thing that Middle explains far better than I.
I'm also thinking of my dad this weekend. Today would have been Mom and Dad's 54th anniversary.
Middle is a man with much knowledge!
Sad about your dad, bb. What an interesting memory that was.
jbhat
ps--I've been having to select Publish Your Comment twice for the last couple of weeks in order to make my comments save. Did something change?