THUNDER over Louisville!

Over the weekend was the kick off of the Kentucky Derby Festival with Thunder Over Louisville. They have a big festival like Portland has with the Rose Festival. There are rides and activities at the waterfront for the next few weeks and they kick off the whole thing with a 7 hour air show and then 30 minutes of fireworks at the end of the day. There was a schedule of the planes in the show in the paper and Kyle was excited for every single one of them. Total investment to get into the airshow and festival was $18 for the pins (which will get us into any of the festival events over the next two weeks, minus the derby) and $10 for parking. We were able to take our own food for the day and toys for the kids to play with while we were watching the air show. We've planned on this for weeks now and were so excited to go. The kids were excited to see the planes and fireworks and we thought it would be such a fun family day. It's been beautiful weather ALL week and then the rain came in Friday evening. So, so sad! Saturday we woke to COLD weather after warm weather all week. It topped at about 54 degrees. We decided that since it wasn't raining, we would still go, but I was a little nervous. We had to pack a lot more than we had planned with extra blankets and coats and a tarp in case it rained again.

Eddie and Gordon were able to stay pretty warm, although none of us were actually comfortable. All of the kids won t-shirts from the Army Reserves. The older two kids held onto the bar for 15 seconds to win their shirts and Gordon did 15 pull ups (with his dad's help) for his shirt. They are all night shirts on the kids, but they love their new shirts!

In between the airplanes, this is how the kids spent their time. Celeste brought books to read and the boys brought a whole backpack full of cars. We ended up sitting on a small rocked area, so the boys buried the cars and made cities and castles in the rocks. They were dirty, but had a great time.

After I don't know how many planes and 5 hours, we decided we were too cold to stay any longer. I know, we had made it that long, why not just stay for the rest, but we had actually gotten there an hour early to make sure we could find good spots to see everything, so we had only see 4 hours of the show and the sun wasn't coming out. As you can see in the pictures, the sky was gray and it was cold. Kyle told the kids that if we left right then, we could have pizza and ice cream. Celeste was all in and after talking Eddie into it, Gordon followed a long. We let Ed choose the pizza because he was the hardest to get to leave and then we were off! We ended up watching the rest of the airshow on TV while eating pizza and taped the fireworks to watch the next evening because we had church early the next morning. Next year we promised the kids that if the sun was shining at all, we would stay for the whole thing. I wish I had pictures of the fireworks display that we saw because it was amazing on TV. The picture up above was taken from the news website, but I can only imagine what it was like downtown. I can definitely say they weren't kidding when they said it was thunder because just watching it on TV made my heart pump harder and gave me chills! It definitely gives us something to look forward to next year. If there is any sun at all, we'll be there for the day and enjoying it from start to finish! If anyone wants to join us, you're welcome to come, we would love it!!