The 4th

In my uncle's Cessna

I had an eventful independence day. It started with a quick flight in my uncle Rob's new Cessna. He took me and my grandma around he lake and over the cabin. However, much to my chagrin, the flight was strictly loop and barrel-roll free. I did manage to get a decent selfie out of it though.

After our flight it was off to the Shawano gun club for some shooting. My firearms are all still back in California, lonely and early awaiting my return, but luckily my uncles came well prepared. In all I think I ended up shooting three AR-15s, two chambered for .308 and one .223, and two ruger 10/22s. In addition to a standard paper target range, the Shawano gun club also has a steel silhouette range. There's something satisfying about the sound of a bullet striking a steel target that you just don't get out of paper target shooting.

My uncle's .308 AR-15

Then we hit up the fireworks store. Oh, the fireworks store. I've always known that California got the short end of the stick when it came to legal fireworks, but I had no idea to what extent. On the 4th of July in California, you can basically choose between fountains and snakes for your home fireworks display. In Wisconsin you can, and should, walk into a fireworks store and walk out with several dynamite sticks worth of straight up explosives. I hypothesize that if a Wisconsin fireworks store were suddenly teleported to California, everybody in it would go to prison for at least a decade. We grabbed a few mortars (the classic shooting/exploding type), and I grabbed a smattering of everything else that's illegal in California.

A couple of firecrackers I picked up

It turns out that our cabin neighbor has an unhealthy obsession with fireworks shows. When we got back with our meager collection of small, yet thoroughly California-illegal fireworks, we noticed him unloading cases of beer from a van to a boat. But upon closer inspection they weren't cases of beer at all, they were cases of mortar fireworks. Our neighbor had apparently rented a platform boat, bought an entire van-load of mortars that were the size of 30-racks, and even commissioned the construction of a wooden firework rack for holding everything neatly in place on the boat. Once we started our fireworks out on the dock we were completely overshadowed by our neighbors constant barrage of professional-strength firework mortars, which rained down a steady stream of debris on us. All in all though, between the bottle rockets, roman candles, firecrackers, and mortars, I think I got my fill of explosives for a while.