Lessons Learned from the Blue Angels

We went to see the Blue Angels with some friends. Neither one of us, as couples, had ever been to see the Blue Angels so we had made a lot of assumptions. I learned a few lessons from them that I will pass on for your future Blue Angels viewing.

1.  Read all the rules before planning or going. I know they are boring. I know when you see a list of 552 rules, you think, "yeah, yeah....these won't apply to me." You see, that's what I do. I read the main page, it sounds like fun and I go with it. Thank the Lord for my friend, Lori!  She's the reader of the group!  She sent me a message on Friday night (by the way, I received the message after Nate brought the cooler up from the basement, and after buying two large bags of ice to go in the cooler). Her message said that coolers weren't allowed. As Nate and I continue our quest for healthy eating, we had decided to take our own food.....in a cooler, of course! When I got her message, it made me think that maybe a few of those rules did apply to me and maybe, just maybe, I'd benefit from reading them. So I did. I now have two large bags of ice in my freezer that I need to find a use for, as "loose ice" was not allowed. So, as a quick improvisation,  I ended up freezing our water bottles and using them to keep our sandwiches cool.

2. "Gates open at 9:00. The Show begins at 11:40."  I read that and believed that I would see the Blue Angels beginning at 11:40. I thought, well this will be a nice late morning/early afternoon outing. We can see some of the show and leave when we are ready. Instead, we sat out in the sunny/extremely overcast weather (Michigan can never decide what weather it wants to have so it tries to offer a lot of variety in a single day) for several hours watching planes fly around. They just kept flying around in circles. At one point (oh, I don't know...probably around 2:00), I said to Lori, how long do you guys want to stay?  She replied, "well, I would like to see the Blue Angels!"  See? That's how clueless I was about this! I thought we had been seeing the Blue Angels since 11:40! They finally announced The Blue Angels and the intro music began around 3 and their show began about 15 minutes later (or so Nate says...it seemed like an eternity longer than that to me). So, if all you want to see is the Blue Angels show, show up at 3:00. By the time you get there, the people that have been there since 9 are hot and tired and they are leaving already.  So, you'll be able to find a parking spot and not have to wait so long! The good thing was that we hadn't seen these friends in a long while so we had many hours to chat and catch up!

3. I would make an excellent UFO photographer! The explanation lies in the results:

I took so many photos of just gray sky.  I thought I'd only have you suffer through one of them.

This would be one of the many UFO sightings I photographed.

This is also a nice one.... Blurry, cut off planes....I have several of these.

This one shows improvement! I actually got 4 of the planes at once, although it's still blurry.

Probably the best one I took. Fairly clear (although it appears that they are really far away).