How I spent a day in August

There is a soundtrack to this post but rather than being one of those bloggers with an annoying music console that starts blaring automatically (really blows your cover when you're pretending to work), I'm leaving it up to you to turn it on.

RIGHT CLICK ON THIS LINK & CHOOSE OPEN IN NEW TAB.

Just give it a few seconds & you can stay here & enjoy yourself. Ok. All ready? Is it on? :-)

Yes, I saw Top Gun at an impressionable age & it will forever mean fast planes & handsome men to me. And since I conveniently stopped watching tv and following pop culture soon after, Tom Cruise has stayed in my mind just like he was then. (I do not want to hear that he's nuts, or religious, or anything about couches. Lalalalalalala. I can't hear you!)

So - you've figured it out already, right? We went to the Abbotsford International Airshow. The kids had never been, Roo has tons of fond memories of going as a kid & teen, and I'd only been once, with Roo & his friends a couple years before we got married. I got heatstroke. 'nuff said.

Now Amelia was a bit dubious about this outing at first & worried that she'd be bored out of her skull (& get heatstroke), so we popped out to the bookstore the night before to arm ourselves with good reads. Amelia got



and


.

I got this:




I told Amelia that if worse came to worst, we would sit in the shade of the car with our feet in a cooler full of ice & read our books. In my case, I planned to just look at the cover.

But you know - there was no need to worry, because one of the first sights that cheered our eyes was this:

Well, hello there.

Yes, dude on the right is so hot that even dude on the left is checking out his butt.

I'm pretty sure that's Goose & Maverick, btw.

This is the Galaxy. It's American & it's very, very big. Let's just leave it at that.

And if you think you'd caption it something else, especially as it follows picture 1, just know that I've had to do a lot of backspace/delete on this line.

Here's my merry crew walking away. I was falling behind because I was taking pictures. Sometimes of airplanes even.

This was a pretty awesome part of the show, where they had a CAF ground Assault demonstration, with air support from a CF-18 Hornet.

Many things going boom.

This is an example of an ongoing theme: heritage formation flights. This would be a formation of planes of similar type from various eras, flying together to honor the past, present & future. I liked it.

This is another thing that made Hugo leap for joy as huge fireballs appeared on the ground. If you look on the far right at the bottom, I just caught the edge of one of them.

I think that's the F-15 Strike Eagle.

Here's Hugo & the Coyote, which is not a LAV but a reconnaissance vehicle. I went to the CF booths & examined all the displays thoroughly so that I could give the children the correct information. The things I have to do......all for a good cause so I forced myself.

This SAME Coyote btw was in the ground assault demo just minutes before. After it finished its demo, it returned to its parking spot which happened to be right beside where we had pitched our chairs & blankets. How cool is that?

In the floppy hat there we have a lovely woman & as we have listened to two seasons of Afghanada, I promptly decided that this is what Coach looks like. And I think that's Chuckie with her.

Meanwhile, back in the air, there were a lot of these games of chicken on a really large scale.

I tell you, I can.not.watch.

But I also cannot tear my eyes away.

Um, I don't know. Plane. And I'm pretty sure there is a plane streaking towards it from the right.

Hugo.

Happy.

Another game of chicken.

What? What's that you're saying? You're getting a bit bored? These pictures suck because they were taken into the sun with a cheap camera? Sorry. How about this to perk you up?

That's a CT 156 Harvard II. It's a turboprop trainer for the early stages of NATO's Flying in Canada training program. Sorry that you can't see much of the actual plane.....

Here's that pic again, with Amelia. No, I was NOT just posing my kid in front of handsome men in uniform. How could you suggest that?

You could not get AWAY from these handsome men. GET OUT OF MY PICTURE, I'd shout. And they just stand there all buff and mysterious behind their shades.

Ok, back in the sky.

That's one of the Thunderbirds & it's upside down in front of scenic Mt Baker. I'm thinking of barfing just looking at the picture.

Another one of the heritage formation flights Amelia, who actually was paying attention (unlike some people, apparently) tells me I'm WRONG. This was the Warbirds run & these are Harvard something-something.

These are the CAF Skyhawks. There are three of them up there hanging on to each other with their legs. So we were told by the announcer.

We were also told that it's very hard & that this is why they are so buff. Wait, maybe I imagined that part.

Here they are coming down & you can see the 3 separate, um, parachuters? Parachutists? Crazy people who have tight butts and jump out of planes?

Back on the ground, Hugo enlisted. Here he is with his gear (he just needs regulation shorts & I'm not sure about the Holeys) MINUS three days' supply of food & one day's supply of water. The dude we spoke with had served in Afghanistan & said he was going through about 3 gallons of water a day, which of course, he had to carry. That would be roughly 12kg of water, btw. Hugo also got to try out a C7 assault rifle - well not really try out, kwim, just lift it & pump up the grenade thingie. No pix of that, sorry. I don't what I was doing but I wasn't taking pix. I think I was asking about thingies.

I know nothing about these things. I did know enough to tell Hugo to not point the damned thing at the poor guy at the other side of the table, not even if it's disabled, do not point a weapon at anyone. Poor guy was looking a bit twitchy with all the people grabbing it & promptly pointing it at his chest.

I picked it up too. God, it's heavy.

Back in the air, it was time for the Snowbirds.

They swooped & soared.

They fell out of the sky.

They told us they love us.

They played chicken together!

What? You're bored again? Pix not that good?

That's the Coyote again, which apparently DOES have air conditioning in it but they don't turn it on because it uses up too much power. So they get to drive around sandwiched in this crazy thing, in which there is NO room, with no AC.

Here are the pretty Snowbirds again. We agreed that the US Thunderbirds had better music, a more pumped announcer (& gad, all the announcers were pumped. They all SPOKE! LIKE! THIS! IN A VOICE AT LEAST! ONE OCTAVE LOWER! THAN YOUR NORMAL VOICE!) & generated more crowd excitement but we enjoyed what the Snowbirds actually did in the sky more.

Things like this.

And this.

and that.

Oh, what, for heaven's sake? Are you saying you've had enough already?

Fine. I'll show you my prize photo.

This is the Hornet's cockpit.

OK, that was not quite it. That was the set up. Ready?

Here you go.

Complete with heavenly ray of light.

(ps. It gets bigger if you click on it. Just sayin'.)

Btw, as the Snowbirds finished their show, their mikes were patched into the sound system, and they sang us THIS. If your Take My Breath Away has finished playing & you've resisted replaying, you can have a quick listen. There's about 30 seconds of setting up the scene......

But when the Thunderbirds finished, the announcer asked us to consider joining the US Armed Forces. :-)