Narberth Park
Our first 4th of July in the house, so we found some fireworks close to home and hit it up, not sure what to expect. Narberth is just a hop and skip away from where Tristan goes to school in Ardmore. It's a fairly affluent area, so we were thinking it'd be kinda swanky, with lots of white people and plenty of expensive food. We went straight there after picking up Tristan from his dad's and got there early enough to get a sweet parking spot on the street. There were plenty of people around when we got there, or so we thought...
We strolled around and just randomly picked this spot to plop down on our blanket. There were some people with these huge tarps laid out and we had this little piece of cloth. It was plenty big enough for us, though. I just took this and the next picture from two vantage points at our spot in left-center field. It was probably only 8 pm or so.
See those areas of grass with nobody sitting on them? Yeah, that was a mosh pit by 9:30. We happened to set our stuff down near the pretzel/hot dog/lemonade stand [good], which was right near the exit [good], and a bathroom [good], but ended up being smack next to a footpath [bad] that got progressively smaller [bad] as darkness approached and then disappeared when the fireworks started [bad] and then was roughly re-created right through one corner of our blanket in the middle of the show [bad bad bad]. It was colossally madpacked.
No, we didn't have Lionel Richie, but we did get Narberth's own The Zing Kings! Apparently they play it every year. They were clear on the other side of the field, and I took this picture with my digital camera - accidentally set on VGA size (smallest) - and little did I know I had 16x digital zoom in that mode! I always shoot in 5.0 (megapixel) mode and re-size for website/email use. The lens has 4.0x optical zoom. 16x digital zoom!?! Crazy.
Believe it or not, this picture was actually taken a few minutes AFTER the next one...
This was taken with flash ON, which somehow makes the rest of the picture look darker than if you use natural light? It befuddles me. Too freakin' cute, though.
Fireworks don't do much for me. Too loud, too boring. It's cool to hang out with your fam and people watch, though. And Tristan loved it. I was also psyched to take some pictures of the works of fire in action. As best I could.
This one was especially pretty, I think.
I love how this one looks almost cartoony - like something blew up in space. Very sci-fi.
Got a couple of these with the streamer/shooting star nucleus.
By the time the finale was rolling around (by the way, this is not a picture of the finale), my ears were killing me and I was tired of the humongous 5-ton booms those things were making. I was literally in pain. That's definitely one thing I inherited from my father, a healthy disdain for fireworks (displays or personal). But Tristan had a ball.
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Strangely enough, besides the pretzels & hot dogs, there were hardly any food stands around. Shocked the hell out of me. There was a food cart parked on the street selling "gourmet" cheesesteaks, but we didn't even notice that until after we put away 3 hot dogs and a pepperoni pretzel. The strawberry lemonade was scrumptious, I must say. There were about a dozen ice cream trucks, though, but nothing dinner-like. I guess they assumed people would eat before they came to the show. The fireworks display was just the capper to Narberth's all-day 4th of July festival, with loads of carnival food and games and such, but all that stuff was pretty much gone by 8 pm. Bummer. But it was easy to get to, close to home, came with live music and we had a good time. Right on.
Definitely lots of white people.
