The Air Show

Well, we went to the air show at Luke Air Force Base on Saturday! It was pretty cool.

It was an absolute nightmare getting there, though! I really didn't think about how many thousands of people would be going at the exact same time as us. If we go next year, we'll go a lot earlier & hopefully avoid some of the mess.

My sister and her kids are staying with my parents this weekend because it's their spring break. So they came over and went to the air show with us. It was nice to see them again. Erin was glad to see her cousins and especially her Aunt Kristil. Robbie was happy, too, but we obviously don't see them often enough, since he just called everyone "Cousin".

All the parking was off-site, and the lot we went to had school buses shuttling everyone into the show. There were several crazy lines of people waiting for buses. After waiting about an hour, we realized the buses had stopped coming back to the parking lot. We found out that a head-on collision had closed off an intersection and none of the buses could get through. After waiting that long, we weren't about to turn around and go home! Lots of people did, though, and that made the lines shorter.

I was hot and crabby and impatient with my poor kids, but they were really pretty good; better behaved than me! So were Kristil's kids. Especially for just standing out in the desert with nothing to do for so long! Poor things. After another half hour or 45 minutes, we were finally on a bus! Crazy to wait so long? Probably, but I say it's crazier to wait that long and just end up going home. Robbie was really happy to ride a school bus like a big kid. He giggled and talked about the cheesy bus for the whole ride.

The ten of us put the bright orange port-a-potties through a rigorous usage, and we went inside the show. I liked that everyone could just wander around the tarmac and hang out in the shade under the planes & stuff. They let us go inside this big cargo plane, which was pretty exciting:

Here are a few pictures of the kids inside. I had the kids sit down, and I couldn't get Robbie to look up. After I took the picture, I realized he was trying to buckle his seat belt - Poor thing thought we were going for a ride! How sad is that. But he was OK, and we went to check out the rest of the plane...

We got to see a lot of planes doing aerobatics, and even a helicopter going upside down and doing rolls and a bunch of other stuff helicopters were not meant to do. And the jets were so cool! The noise scared the tar out of Robbie, but he got over it. We enjoyed most of the show from the shade under a plane.

Toward the end of the show, we noticed a really old guy shuffling around checking out the planes. He had a cane, and he was wearing his old pilot hat. I'm not one to start chatting with people I don't know, but I bet he would've been an interesting guy to talk to. He was really admiring the planes; I'm sure they were much different than what he flew back in the day!

We stayed to watch the beginning of Thunderbirds' show. We would've liked to have seen the whole thing, but there was NO WAY we were going to wait in line for a bus again afterward when everyone else was leaving too! So we left after the first few passes and watched some of the show from the bus.

Here's my filthy, sunburned boy thoroughly enjoying a ride on a school bus:

On the way home, we stopped at Pizza Hut because Kristil had some sweet hook-ups for free pizza. We came home, cleaned the top layer of dirt off the kids, and gorged ourselves on pizza! It was a long day, but pretty fun. I was glad I got to see my sister and my niece & nephews. I didn't get any pictures of us all together, though. Next time!