On the very tip of the peninsula we live on, there’s a small town called Gills Rock. You can catch a passenger-only boat out to Washington Island from there. This little town has the best fireworks on the peninsula as far as I’m concerned!
The event starts with music and food at 4:00 and the fireworks start at 9:30. Mark and I waited at home until the sun wasn’t beating down so hot (in the 80s!) around 7:30. There were probably at least a thousand people there, mostly tourists. I headed first to the booth where my boss had been volunteering since before 4:00 to sell cookies and brownies and Mac and Cheese. There were other booths there too. One was apparently selling glow sticks because a number of children had them.
Out of all the people that were there, Mark and I saw Ken and Janet from the Tuesday night youth group I was taking Ashton to. We stopped and chatted with them for a bit. I talked with Alma, a woman I used to work with at the Welcome Center. She has come back to work there this summer, but I hadn’t seen her until this evening. Mark and I found a place down by the water to sit next to the building in the picture above, but when I started noticing how many large spiders there were on the building, we opted to stand! As we were getting situated, I saw a family from my church up ahead sitting on their lawn chairs. I went up and talked with them for a while. Then another former co-worker, Mary Jo, stopped to chat with me for a moment!
As dusk fell, we saw the boat that had all the fireworks on it getting situated out in the water and everyone cheered. Mark and I saw a little boy fishing with a child-sized fishing pole while he was waiting. He caught two small fish and released them as we watched. A girl danced an impromptu Irish jig. Someone on the far shore released Chinese lanterns every few minutes. These are something like a bag with a candle under it. The light goes slowly drifting over the water. At 9:30, the fireworks began…
I noticed that on some of the fireworks that streamed down, they hit the water in front of the pier. Some sparks landed behind the pier where there were people sitting and watching. After some of the series of fireworks, I could see what looked like smoky spiders in the sky, tracing where the sparkles had been. And as the fireworks burst overhead, there were loud reverberations off of the hills across the water from us that sounded like thunder.
At 10:00, I told Mark we needed to leave even though we hadn’t seen the grand finale yet because it was our only chance of beating the crowd to the road. We walked back to the motorcycle with fireworks lighting our way. Mark helped me put my helmet on and then as he was getting ready to pull out of the grassy area where we were parked, the grand finale began. It was so amazing to watch it ahead of us as we turned onto the road and headed toward home!
I hope you all had a fun day too!