what you’ve been waiting for

I just realized that I teased you all horribly with a pre-update on my Independence Day in D.C., and then I never followed it up with an actual update. Sorry about that. Here we go…

First of all, we were slightly misled when we were told we could watch the fireworks from the top of the Pentagon. We never actually went in to see the real spot where we would have watched if we’d gone that route, but I’m told it was more the side of the Pentagon than the top. On the helicopter landing pad. But regardless, we didn’t do that. One of the girls we were hanging out with knew of a spot right on the Potomac kind of across the parking lot from the Pentagon, so we went there, and it was a really nice spot. There was a little grassy hill with a sidewalk at the bottom, and that dropped right off into the river. Across the river, you could see the Washington Monument, and the fireworks went off just above that.

We arrived early (around 4) and set up all our blankets and coolers under a shady tree. We had so much crap, y’all. It was like we were preparing to travel the Oregon Trail. I was just waiting for us to lose our cattle in the river and for someone to die of dysentery. Anyway, Emily and I had tried to sleep in that morning, but we just couldn’t. We both woke up around 8 and vowed to stay in bed until at least 9. We didn’t actually get up until 9:30, but still…we’d been awake for a while already. Then we did some shopping in downtown Arlington before preparing our veggie/dip tray for the pre-fireworks party. So since we hadn’t slept in like we wanted that morning, we were kind of tired, so when we put the blankets down and got all situated under the shady tree, I really could have taken a nap. And as soon as those words left my mouth, the sprinklers came to life. I sat up enough to look over Emily only to see a stream of water shooting straight at me. And suddenly I turned into Neo in the bullet-dodging scene of the Matrix. But that didn’t last because we had to get all the blankets and stuff down off the hill, and there was just no keeping dry during that chaos.

Then we kept having to move all our crap because the sprinklers started shooting farther and farther as if there were someone sitting in a room somewhere watching us and controlling the trajectory of the spray, and before we knew it, we were all huddled with all the stuff on a little concrete slab way off to one side. And that’s when the police came for the first time.

They came to let us know that there was a severe thunderstorm headed our way, and that maybe we might want to move. But we decided we were already wet, so we’d just stick it out. Then they came by again to tell us that…seriously, we might want to move as there’d been a tornado spotted not too far away, and it was headed straight for us. Right. SO, we packed up all the stuff in the cars and went to wait out the storm in the parking lot. But we had all this fried chicken, and fried chicken needs to be eaten, so we just all got out and tried to squeeze under tailgates (of SUV’s, not trucks) and umbrellas to eat. Then we decided we’d go back to the apartment of 2 of the girls, eat, dry off, and then come back when it was closer to time for the show.

So we all got back into the cars, got lost trying to get to the apartment, got to the apartment, got out all the food, ate all the food, got back in the cars, got lost trying to get back to the Pentagon, got back to the Pentagon to find that it was not only completely dry, but also completely packed, found a spot, laid out all our stuff again, and finally…finally…settled down to watch the fireworks. Which were phenomenal.

Happy Birthday, America. I had a great time at your party in spite of all the water that got dumped on my head.

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