(Sorry, no pics)

This year I was out of town at a camp for the 4th so I couldn't really do much. Our whole group went to the house of one of the camp attendees uncle or something (I don't remember, I didn't know any of the people). There was a lot of food, so that was good!

The owner of the house did have quite a bit of Class C fireworks, and even managed to get a few Class B 2.5 inch and 3 inch shells that he said he got at one of the tribal reservations. He had quite a bit of small stuff, several large shell packs and about 10 cakes. I guess he was impatient becase he was lighting stuff even before it got dark. The police and fire department had both been by before we got there because fireworks are illegal where he was, but they just told him to be careful and not set off anything too big (I think neighbors complained about him setting of the larger shells).

There were a few average cakes and a few good ones, but one in particular caught everyones attention! This was not because of it's spectacular effects or anything, but because of an accident. It was set on top of a used cake and lit, but not centered properly. It was a 5x5 tube cake, and one the 5 tubes of one side were hanging over the edge. When the tubes over the edge fired, it tipped the cake towards the crowd of people and shot the last few shots into the crowd! Fortunatley there were only a few shots left, not the whole thing, and nobody was hurt. Be sure your cakes are on stable ground when you light them!

The Class C shells were all pretty good. He had some triple break shells of the same design as the ones in the last series of my Inside Shells pictures, so I got to see how they worked before I lit my own at my party. He also had some smaller than normal Class C shells that were okay, but had smaller breaks obviously. They tried putting four tubes next to each other and lighting them all with a barbeque lighter, but that doesn't work very well and he usually only got two lit in time. I told him to use road flares because they work a lot better.

The larger 2.5" and 3" shells were definetly far superior to Class C shells. He had two metal mortars for them, and metal sleeves to allow the 2.5" shells to fit. The chryshanthemum shells were average, but still much better than any Class C because of the far larger break and height. The best shells were the salutes. Most of his shells were salutes, adn they were very loud!

I didn't actually light anything myself because I was a guest who didn't know the host, but I did watch everything. After that there was a show put on by the town across the river that we watched from the deck. I thought the show was put on rather poorly, but the town wasn't very big and probably didn't have much of a budget for a big show. All in all a pretty good July 4th because I saw plenty of fireworks and it helped to build my own anticipation for my parth that would happen in a few weeks.