Fireworks at Mount Rushmore

Last night we went to the Fireworks at Mt. Rushmore - I had never been, but Mike got us the VIP hook up through his job, so we took my parents as a payback for our New York City trip (ha, ha). We got reserved parking, reserved ampitheater seating, and they had a nice little BBQ reception thingy for dinner beforehand. VIP was definitely the best way to navigate around the crush of 20,000 people.

We still got there pretty early, not really knowing how long it would take with all the traffic (people park along the highway all the way down to Keystone, 3 miles away). There are public lots at Rushmore, but they fill early in the day.

Once we found our seats and and checked out the reception; we saw the Lieutenant Governor there, Dennis Daugaard, and Rep. Stephanie Herseth had a reserved table, but she didn't show up at the reception (although she spoke later in the night during the program, so maybe we just missed her). After that, we sat through a couple hours of program (National Guard band, presentation of the flag to the last surviving World War I vet - 106 years old!, more speeches, lots of recognition of the military peeps in the audience).

Then at 9:10 they did a B1-Bomber fly over - it was so fast you barley had time to look up. While we were at the reception, a stealth bomber did a fly-over. If I saw that and didn't know what it was, I probably would have thought it was a spaceship - totally doesn't look like any plane I've ever seen. Anyway, both flyovers were very loud and very cool.

At 9:15 the fireworks started. It was fantastic. If you were going to have an epileptic seizure, that show definitely would have been the trigger. It was just an unreal amount of fireworks, and the finale was so dense with explosions it lit up the whole Black Hills.

Anyway, a great experience. At moments, I even got a patriotic feeling I used to get a lot ... but it's been a while. Many of the things that have gone down in the last 8 years have made me, well, sad and hopeless. But the fact that I can be a lone liberal in my entire family of GOPs and the worst it brings out is some healthy arguments at Christmas dinner - I suppose that's what being free is all about. The fact that there is a chance that after 8 years of an ideology I don't agree with, we are allowed the opportunity for change - that's freedom, too.