Target's night in the sky.

This past week, Minneapolis has been celebrating it's annual aquatennial, honestly I'm not really sure what an AQUAtennial is, but the info page says they named it this because the week that it is held on (3rd full week in July) is typically the driest week of the year... although our whole summer has been dry.

So to wrap up the festivities, Target hosts a fireworks display over the Mississippi river in downtown Minneapolis. Somehow we skipped over this last year, but luckily heard about it this year and attended.

The night started off with dinner at a recommended Thai restaurant in uptown. And you know Thai... which means I also had 5 glasses of water along with my meal, but yum yum gotta love Tom Yum soup! So we made it downtown about 8:00 thinking "okay show is at ten, we'll just go early, camp out a spot and play cards while we wait" I think everyone else had this idea as well! We had to park about a mile away, but we did get a bit of entertainment on the walk, there were little houses:


all along the path we took. They kinda looked like little Harry Potter houses. Rather interesting and telling us about various old buildings in the area. I also stopped to snap this photo:


We continued down with a plan to cross the stone arch bridge and find a spot over by the mill museum, but once we got there we found out the bridge had closed at 8 in preparation for the show (it was 8:15 at this point), if we wouldn't have stopped to read all the little houses we might have made it across in time, but God had another plan for us, and it ended up working out perfectly. At this point, the water from the Thai restaurant had ran right through me and I really needed to pee!!! Too bad there was only ONE port-a-pottie, as far as my eye could see, and a line practically as long as the stone arch bridge... so I just thought I'd try and hold it a while longer. After hearing about the bridge being closed we decided to go back to the spot where I snapped the city view - since it was, well a nice open, quiet area to watch the fireworks. So we went back and camped out, it was quiet to begin with but as ten o'clock drew near other people had the same idea as us, luckily only a few.


And while waiting for the show, my urge to pee grew, and the good 'ol countryness came out in me... I mean there was tall brush around us, so naturally the idea popped into my head, and it was better than walking to another port-a-pottie - who knows how far away. So I found a hidden area and popped a squat, ahhh the relief. Then I stood up only to find myself covered in cock-a-burs!!!! Rather hilarious of myself, I managed to pull them all off before heading back into view, but it was worth it! :-)

So we played cards while waiting and I got some great shots of the city, the sunset, and the moon:




And a few Airplanes going over head, can you find the one in this photo??:


Then the show began!!!




Kyle said it was probably the best fireworks show he'd ever seen! It was very good, Target does know how to put on a good fireworks show :-)

(**click on any photo to see more pictures from the evening)